If you have been submitting accreditation materials by email and PDF for years, CEAB just changed the rules. Tandem is live, the 2026–2027 cycle requires digital submission through the new platform, and most coordinators are reading the user guide wondering what it means for their actual workflow. This post translates the technical requirements into practical next steps.
Tandem is not just a new button to click. It is a structural change to how Canadian engineering programs submit evidence to CEAB. Understanding the difference between what Tandem handles and what it leaves to you will save you weeks of scrambling before your first submission.
What is Tandem?
Tandem (app.tandem.ca) is Engineers Canada’s new online submission platform for accreditation visit materials. It replaces the email-and-PDF workflow that Canadian programs have used for decades. The 2026–2027 accreditation cycle is the first to require submissions through Tandem, aligned with the new 2025 Accreditation Criteria and Procedures.
Engineers Canada publishes user guides, training scenarios, and resource pages for both Higher Education Institutions and Visiting Team members. The system provides a structured portal for uploading self-study artifacts, evidence documentation, and visit materials. CEAB can now review materials digitally before the visit, making the whole process more structured and transparent.
Source: Engineers Canada Tandem Resources for HEIs
What changes for your workflow
To understand what Tandem means for you, it helps to compare the old workflow with the new one.
The old way: Evidence lived wherever it lived — spreadsheets on shared drives, course outlines on faculty computers, assessment data in your LMS. Six to eight weeks before the visit, you scrambled to find everything, compile it into a coherent package, convert it to PDF, and email a massive attachment to CEAB. You hoped nothing was missed. You got no feedback until the visiting team arrived on campus.
The Tandem way: A structured upload portal with organized sections. Materials submitted digitally, tracked in the system, and reviewable by CEAB before the visit. More transparent. More organized. Less reliant on a single email with ten attachments.
That is an improvement. But here is what the user guide does not tell you:
Tandem handles the submission layer. It does not handle the evidence management layer.
The platform expects you to arrive with organized, complete materials. It does not help you collect evidence throughout the year. It does not map Graduate Attributes to course outcomes. It does not flag gaps in your evidence trail. It does not track continuous improvement cycles. It does not give you a compliance dashboard.
Tandem is the destination. It is not the journey.
Three practical steps before your first Tandem submission
Most programs are still managing evidence in spreadsheets between Tandem submissions. Here is how to close that gap before the system asks you to upload.
Step 1: Audit your GA evidence coverage
Pull up your Graduate Attributes matrix. For each of the seven GAs, ask yourself one question: “Could I produce the evidence a visiting team would request in under ten minutes?”
If the answer is “I would need to search three spreadsheets and email two faculty members,” that is a gap. Tandem will not fix it. The system expects the evidence to be organized when you upload it. If it is scattered, you will spend the same amount of time gathering it — you will just be doing it under a tighter deadline because CEAB can see your submission status in real time.
Action: Start a simple inventory. Which GAs have strong, traceable evidence trails? Which ones rely on a single person’s memory or a spreadsheet nobody else can open?
Step 2: Build a living evidence repository
The Tandem user guide describes structured sections for different categories of evidence. Your job is to have that evidence organized in the same structure before you ever log in to submit.
That means course outlines that are current and accessible. Assessment results linked to the indicators they measure. Faculty names and roles clearly mapped to the courses they teach and the GAs they address. Continuous improvement actions documented with dates, outcomes, and follow-up evidence.
If you are building this in spreadsheets right now, you are doing the right work in the wrong tool. Spreadsheets cannot maintain the relationships between courses, indicators, GAs, and evidence items. They flatten a three-dimensional problem into rows and columns, and the relationships are lost every time someone copies a cell or renames a tab.
Action: Map your evidence to the same structure Tandem expects. If your tool does not do that mapping automatically, you are doing it manually — which is fine, as long as you are aware of the labour it costs.
Step 3: Identify your single points of failure
Tandem submissions are tied to your institution’s account. If the person who owns the evidence is the only person who understands how it is organized, you have a risk. Not a “maybe” risk. A “when” risk. People leave. People go on leave. People get sick.
The Tandem system does not solve this. It assumes the evidence is ready when it is time to upload. If your coordinator is the only person who knows where the GA three evidence lives, and that coordinator is out for the month when the submission window opens, you have a problem.
Action: Document your evidence structure so a second person can navigate it. Better yet, use a system where the structure is built in, not handwritten in someone’s notes.
Where MapOutcomes fits in
We built MapOutcomes for the gap between Tandem submissions. Tandem is the submission platform. MapOutcomes is the evidence management platform that keeps your program ready to submit, any time CEAB asks.
Here is what that means in practice:
- Connected evidence map. Every piece of evidence is linked to the GA, indicator, and course it supports. When you need to upload to Tandem, the evidence is already organized in the structure CEAB expects.
- Continuous gap detection. The platform flags weak GAs and missing evidence trails in real time. You do not discover gaps six weeks before the visit. You see them on the dashboard every day.
- CEAB-native data model. The mapping structure follows CEAB’s framework, not ABET’s. Graduate Attributes, indicators, curriculum map — it is built for what your visiting team will evaluate.
- Institutional memory. The data stays when the coordinator leaves. The next person inherits a connected system, not a folder of spreadsheets with unclear naming conventions.
Tandem makes the submission cleaner. MapOutcomes makes the evidence ready. Together, they cover the full workflow.
What to do this summer
The 2026–2027 cycle is underway. If your program has a visit coming up in the next 18 months, Tandem will be part of your workflow before the fall semester ends.
Use the summer to do the three steps above: audit your GA coverage, build a living evidence structure, and identify the single points of failure in your current process. When September hits, you will be in a position to submit to Tandem with organized evidence rather than scrambling to compile it.
The coordinators who treat Tandem as more than a new upload button — who use it as a reason to fix the evidence management gaps underneath — will be the ones who walk into their next visit prepared. The rest will have a prettier submission format for the same old scramble.
This post was written for Accreditation Coordinators and Department Chairs in CEAB-accredited engineering programs. For a breakdown of the new criteria Tandem aligns with, see CEAB’s New Criteria: What Changes for Your Next Accreditation Cycle. For the case on why continuous evidence collection beats the six-year crunch, see The Year-Round Accreditation Burden.