What does Always Award New mean?

This article details how the Always Award New flag behaves when creating or editing a competency in the RIW System.


Always Award New - Selected 

When a competency is defined as ‘Always Award New’ (AAN), each new award of the competency is treated as a separate unique award. It is displayed and stored as a separate item for each award. 

 

Prior awards which are valid (and not yet expired) are considered when determining job role validity, even where a more recent award of the same competency is recorded but is not yet valid (e.g. awaiting evidence, verification etc.).

 

Always Award New – Not Selected 

When a competency is not defined as AAN (let’s refer to this as a Recert), re-awarding a not-yet expired competency already held by the worker will update the original award by simply extending the expiry to the new expiry date based on the date of the latest award and the competency’s expiry logic/definition. This is also how the update is handled in the database; the expiry date of the original award is overwritten with the new one.

 

If the previously awarded competency has already expired when the new instance is recorded (i.e. there is a gap between expiry date of the former and award date of the latter) then the system will treat this as a separate award and will not extend the expiry of the original (since the expectation is that the competency must have been held continuously for this to be a valid Recert). In this scenario a new, separate, award will be recorded (i.e. similar to how an AAN award would be processed). However, since this competency has already expired, the prior award would not be considered when determining job role validity.

 

Where the competency extends the original expiry date due to the continuous holding of the competency (i.e. it is awarded prior to the expiry of the existing award), awarding the ‘extension’ or recertification currently invalidates the competency as a whole (including the prior award) where this recent award/extension requires additional actions to occur (verification, evidence, assessment etc.) before being considered valid.

 

What happens if I change the AAN Flag?

Changing a competency definition from Always Award New (AAN) to not AAN will not modify all previous awards to group these into one line. It will, when the next award of the competence occurs, extend the most recent previous award with the new expiry date (assuming the previous award had not yet expired - as per standard non AAN logic described above).

 

In the example below, the cardholder was awarded an AAN competency 4 times (first screenshot) and then the definition was changed to not AAN and awarded the competence again (with an award date of 01/04/20 and a new expiry date of 31/05/20). You can see in the second screenshot below the impact; only the last award has now been extended (because it was still in date when the latest award was created).

 

 

 

 

Similarly, changing a competency definition from Not AAN to AAN will not modify all previous awards to display as unique awards of the competence. It will only affect future awards with these now being recorded as separate awards. In the screenshot below the competency was originally non-ANN when first awarded (30/03/20 – the ‘First Award’ date) and was then extended (on 01/04/20 – the ‘Award Date’) to be valid until 31/05/20. Having then changed the definition to be AAN, and then awarding the competence again on 07/04/20 (so before the previous expiry date of 31/05/20) you can see that this has now been recorded as a separate line item.

 

 

Can users still report on the prior award when AAN isn’t selected?

 It is not possible for a user to report on the prior award’s expiry when a not Always Award New (AAN) competency is defined. This is because it is being stored as one award in the database and the original expiry date is not retained.


RIW Knowledge Centre Article Link:

https://support.riw.net.au/support/solutions/articles/51000100598


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