This page sets out where these questions actually come from, in the Commission's own words, and the one piece of evidence that can show you, before an assessor ever arrives, where your own workers are already answering them differently from each other.
What the assessor is actually testing
The interview moment tests a specific requirement, not a general impression. In the Commission's own wording:
"Workers have the skills and knowledge to deliver the supports they are assigned."
That's the exact indicator, sitting in the Core Module's competency-related commentary rather than the separate list of eleven Human Resource Management indicators most providers know better, the ones covering training records, supervision and induction. It's a smaller, less-quoted line, and it's exactly the one an interview is built to probe. A file can't answer it. A person can.
This requirement applies whichever audit you're facing, Verification or Certification. Judgement under an interview question isn't reserved for the higher-risk registration groups. Any worker delivering supports can be asked what they'd do.
The kind of situation these questions draw on
These aren't hypothetical categories. They come straight from the obligations every support worker already trains on.
A person refusing medication, the territory covered in Medication Awareness for Support Workers, where a worker has to know what they can and can't do, and when to escalate rather than persuade.
A change in someone's behaviour, covered in Understanding Behaviour of Concern, where the question isn't whether a worker noticed something was different, it's what they did about it and why.
A first aid situation with nobody else around, the exact scenario Emergency, Disaster and Incident Response is built on, where an assessor wants the actual sequence of decisions, not just "I'd call for help."
A rights and consent question, the ground Participant Rights and Consent covers, where a worker has to hold someone's right to choose against a duty of care they also carry.
Four different scenarios, one underlying question each time. Not "did you finish the course." What would you actually do.
Why a completion record can't answer for a worker
A training register is useful evidence, and an assessor will ask for it. It proves a worker sat through a course, on a date, which is real evidence for four of the five things the training indicator asks for. What it can't do is stand in for the worker when the assessor is standing in front of them. A completion date describes the past. The interview is about right now, in this specific situation, what does this person actually say.
A self-reported readiness questionnaire doesn't close that gap either. It asks a provider how they think their team would handle it, which is a different kind of evidence again, an opinion about a future event rather than a record of one that's already happened.
What CORA shows you, and where the line actually sits
Here's the distinction worth being precise about. What a worker will say to an assessor next month is nobody's to promise. Nobody can predict a conversation that hasn't happened yet, and any platform telling you otherwise is guessing on your behalf, not evidencing anything.
What CORA holds is different, and it's real: what your workers are already saying today, on record, inside the same kind of scenario. Every CORA course puts a worker inside a situation built from a real shift and asks them to make a call, medication, behaviour change, an emergency alone, the same territory an assessor draws from. That decision gets scored and kept.
Two workers can complete the identical course and land on different answers to the identical question, right now, weeks or months before any audit. CORA shows you exactly where that split sits, by worker, by team and by scenario, while there's still time to do something about it. That's a record of a decision that's already happened.
The Workforce Capability Report: where the divergence shows up
Every scored decision feeds the Workforce Capability Report, aggregated by decision skill, by team and over time. The report is built across four pillars, Capability, Operational Consistency, Readiness and Assurance, and the number that matters most for this exact problem is divergence: two workers, one scenario, two different answers.
That's derived evidence, built from decisions your own workers actually made, not a self-assessment or an opinion about how training is going.
Verification or Certification, the same question either way
This one doesn't split by audit type the way some requirements do. Whether your registration groups put you through Verification or Certification, an assessor can ask a worker what they'd do, and the underlying requirement, that workers have the skills and knowledge to deliver the supports they're assigned, sits inside both. See the full checklist of what each audit type asks for.
Every claim on this page is about a decision that's already on record, not a prediction of what happens in an interview room. See the standard we hold every claim on the site to.
Closing the gap before the assessor does
Once you can see where two workers disagree on the same scenario, you know exactly which team, which shift pattern or which course to revisit before anyone from the Commission walks in. Build a pathway around the specific people that team supports, reassign the course, and the next scored decision either closes the gap or confirms it's already closed.
This sits alongside Support Observation, the other place CORA evidences worker skill directly, watched on shift rather than in an interview room.
That's a different kind of audit preparation to reading back over a file the week before. It's happening on record, continuously, from the first course a worker ever completes.
Common questions
What does an NDIS assessor ask support workers at interview?
There's no published script. Assessors typically sample a handful of workers directly and ask what they'd do in a specific situation, drawn from obligations like medication, behaviour change or an emergency response, testing judgement rather than recall.
Can a training register replace an interview?
No, and it isn't meant to. A training register evidences that a course was completed. An interview tests what a worker would actually do, which is a different kind of evidence entirely.
Does this apply to a Verification audit or only Certification?
Both. The requirement that workers have the skills and knowledge to deliver the supports they're assigned sits inside Verification and Certification alike.
How does CORA identify where workers disagree?
Every worker's decisions inside course scenarios are scored and kept. The Workforce Capability Report aggregates those scores by worker, by team and by scenario, so two different answers to the same question are visible on one screen.