AUGUST 2026
RE: EXAM READINESS, EQUIVALENCY, AND A CERTIFICATE THAT TRAVELS
Dear Ms. White,
Every apprenticeship authority in Canada owns the same three things inside its own borders: the standard a trade is measured against, the exam that decides who is certified, and the certificate itself. We are We Know Training Inc., a Canadian training company, and this briefing is about all three.
In 2023–24, the overall pass rate across Ontario trades with certifying exams was 44.5%. Ontario has since made the first attempt free for apprenticeship completers, brought exam delivery in-house, and cut registration processing from 60 days to 12. The system around the exam has been rebuilt at real speed. What has not changed is what happens in the weeks before a candidate sits down — and that is where the pass rate is actually decided.
Your 2026–2029 plan names higher Certificate of Qualification pass rates as a measure of success under Streamlined Registration and Certification. We built an instrument for precisely that measure.
Measure readiness against your standard, before the exam. Then let the certificate prove itself anywhere in Canada.
The first instrument is ReadyEngine™. It takes a published exam blueprint and turns it into a live, continuously updated prediction of one thing: readiness to pass. Every question and lesson traces back to a specific competency in the standard, which means it measures against your standard, not a vendor’s interpretation of it. In a live, regulator-accredited licensing program it moved the pass rate from 81% to 96% within two attempts, and cut time to complete by 48%. It has carried into four regulated domains without a change to the algorithm. The trades are the next mapping, not the next rebuild.
Two places it applies directly to your mandate. Before a certifying exam, it tells a candidate — and the sponsor who invested in them — whether they are ready, before a seat and a fee are spent. And before a Trade Equivalency Assessment, it gives an experienced or internationally trained worker an honest baseline against the Ontario standard, so the challenge route stops being a coin flip.
The second instrument is Oliu™, a pan-Canadian trust network for verifiable digital credentials built on the production-mature W3C standard. Today a Certificate of Qualification is paper and a plastic wallet card, backed by a public register that answers one question well: whether someone may legally work in a compulsory trade. That covers 23 of Ontario’s 144 prescribed trades. For the other 121, for a supervisor at a gate with no browser, and for any employer outside Ontario, there is no equivalent instant check. Issued through Oliu, the same certificate is tamper-evident, held by the tradesperson on their own phone, and verifiable by any employer, site, or province in seconds — with STO remaining the issuer and the sole authority over what is issued, to whom, and on what terms.
The timing is not ours. In May, Ottawa committed $6 billion over five years toward 100,000 new skilled trades workers, with an explicit commitment to halve time to Red Seal certification through digital credentialing, online exams, and modernized apprenticeship tracking. The certifying bodies that can already do that work will shape how it is spent.
We are not asking you to fund anything today. We would like to show your standards and certification teams how the mapping works, and to scope one trade as a measured pilot.
Where this work meets STO’s 2026–2029 plan.
Drawn from Skilled Trades Ontario’s published 2026–2029 Strategic Plan. We have kept this deliberately high level.
The instrument that proves a worker is ready, before the exam, not after. The evidence, the mechanism, and five levers toward 100,000 workers.
A pan-Canadian trust network for verifiable digital credentials, instant to verify, impossible to quietly fake, portable across provinces.
We Know Training Inc.: eight brands, three customer personas, and one engine underneath, how it all fits together.