Fast food trainer - solo-duty certification checklist: skills, knowledge, and judgment as separate sections, the examiner is never the trainer who taught them, food-safety items are zero-tolerance, and the signed record is archived for traceback

You are a certification designer for a fast food
chain. Produce the solo-duty certification checklist
for an examiner to run on site. Candidate: a new
hire who completed three-day onboarding; station
[register / kitchen / expo].

Structure: items in three sections, each line with
four columns - assessment method / pass criterion /
failure handling / note (common wrong ways).

Section one: skills (live demonstration, each item
timed)
About [10] items drawn from the station's daily
repertoire; every pass criterion has two parts:
- Quality: the control points from this store's
  SOP ([blanks] for me to fill with store
  standards)
- Speed: completed within [1.2]x standard time
Example (expo): pack a standard delivery order -
items complete, seal applied, within [X] minutes -
note the common miss: unsecured drink cups
arriving spilled
FIFO retrieval example: the batch taken must be
the earliest-expiring one - note: misreading the
label date

Section two: knowledge (oral or written, my pick)
About [8] items in two kinds:
- Food-safety red lines for this station
  (temperatures, cross-contamination, allergens,
  handwashing triggers) - any single miss fails
  the entire assessment outright (see zero
  tolerance), outside all scoring below
- Process knowledge: shift handover, the incident
  reporting path, the first move in an emergency -
  pass requires "what to do + who to tell"; saying
  only what to do is not a pass

Section three: judgment (scenario drills)
[3] scenarios drawn by the examiner from the
scenario bank, staged live. Each is scored on two
elements:
- Actions taken: what they actually did, against
  the scenario card's reference actions
- Escalation: recognizing the situation exceeds
  their authority and finding the right person to
  tell - a missed escalation fails that scenario
  outright

Verdicts and records:
- Pass line: at most [1] failed skill item, all
  process-knowledge items passed, all scenarios
  passed, zero-tolerance zone untouched
- Zero-tolerance zone (separate, marked red):
  any missed food-safety knowledge item, or any
  red-line behavior during demonstration (such as
  knowingly continuing a wrong action) - one
  trigger fails the whole assessment; no scoring
  offsets
- Examiner: never the candidate's own trainer; the
  store manager or another qualified employee - the
  trainer may attend but does not judge
- Archiving: the sheet records date, examiner,
  per-item verdicts, failed items and their
  handling; candidate and examiner both sign;
  retained [12] months - after an incident this
  sheet is the first document everyone asks for

Failure handling (fixed, not improvised):
- First fail: one day of targeted retraining on the
  failed items, retest of failed items only within
  3 days, same pass line
- Second fail: reassignment review or handling
  under employment policy, same paths as the
  onboarding SOP

Constraints:
- No invented statute numbers or penalty standards -
  food-safety criteria cite this store's SOP and
  brand standards, with the source column named
- Every pass criterion is observable and countable
  - "fluent" and "solid" are banned from the
  criterion column
- No "attitude" or "enthusiasm" items - the release
  certifies operating capability; attitude belongs
  to daily management and never to the release
  decision

Why it is written this way

The examiner never being the trainer is the trust foundation of the whole sheet. A trainer grading their own trainee will bend - not from bad character but from structure: the trainee failing announces that the trainer failed to teach. The trainer attends without judging, which keeps the "trainer knows exactly what was missed" information channel open while the verdict moves to someone with no stake in it. Without this rule, every pass criterion downstream is just decorative ink.

Food-safety items live in a separate zero-tolerance zone instead of the scoring, because the two error types differ in kind: slow skills can be drilled, shaky process knowledge can be recited, but one missed red line means the person is an unguided hazard on station - temperature, cross-contamination, allergens, any one forgotten is a real incident waiting for a shift. Offsetting scores (strong skills cancel weak knowledge) is absurd against red lines, so the zone is physically separated from the scoring system and untouched means untouched.

Scenario drills score "actions + escalation" with half the weight on knowing whom to tell, because the true new-hire risk is not mishandling but overhandling: a smoking fryer investigated solo, an allergic reaction apologized away - the "don't make waves" instinct is actively dangerous in week one. A missed escalation fails the scenario on the spot; that is the boundary sense being tested. And the 12-month archive keeps the accountability chain alive: when something goes wrong, "certified or not, signed by whom, what was missed" answers from the file, which is the only way a training role can carry release authority at all.

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