READY Compass · Erasmus+ · 15 questions

The agreement was signed. Everything looked fine.

Then the student arrives on Monday morning. Nobody is expecting them. Three weeks later you are reading the report of why they came home early, and your name is in it.

5 dimensions 15 questions Evidence-based scoring Used inside a session
Request a session code → How it works
5
dimensions
measured
15
evidence-based
questions
4
action directions
after scoring
1
conversation
around it
Live scan preview
R
Relationships
E
Expectations
A
Assignment
D
Development
Y
You-factor
Compass direction: Remove friction
The gap no one names

The Learning Agreement
is not a quality instrument.

It tells you what was agreed. It does not tell you whether anyone in the building knows the intern is coming.

📋
Documents describe intent
A signed Learning Agreement tells you three parties agreed to something. It tells you nothing about who is there on day one, what the intern will actually do that morning, or who picks up when the named supervisor is on holiday.
🌍
Distance removes the signals
You cannot feel the atmosphere of the office. You cannot see who looks up when the intern walks in. You work from emails, forms, and assumptions. The assumptions are the dangerous part.
🔇
Students often say nothing
Many students do not raise concerns with a supervisor in a foreign country. They wait. They cope. They write home. Then one day they stop responding to your emails. That silence is rarely the first signal. It is the last one.
🔎
Rejection needs a language
"I have a bad feeling" does not hold up against a long-standing partner. A documented red score on two critical dimensions does. READY gives you the language to explain a decision your intuition already made.
What makes READY different

Evidence, not intention.

Most quality instruments ask you what you think of an organisation. READY asks you what you have actually verified. The shift is small. The effect is not.

Most checklists
"There is a named supervisor."

Easy to tick. Hard to falsify. The signature on the agreement counts as proof. You move on.

READY asks instead
"I have the name and contact details of the person who will sit next to this intern on day one."

If you have it, you tick it. If you assumed it, you mark it as assumed. If it is not there, you mark it as absent. Three honest categories.

The middle answer is the point. Most assessments collapse into yes or no. READY adds a third category: assumed but not verified. That is where the risk lives. A scan with five yellow answers is not a green light. It is a list of conversations you still need to have.

By the time the Learning Agreement is signed, your job is officially complete. The student's has not yet started.

Most international offices have built remarkable machinery for the first half of that sentence. Step after step. Automated forms. Deadlines that hold across faculties, languages, and countries. For the second half, almost no one has built anything.

Some offices keep a quiet list of partners that did not work out. Whispered to the next coordinator. That is memory, not a system.

READY is the instrument for what happens after the signature. It does not measure the documents. It measures whether someone is named on the other end. Whether something will be ready on Monday. Whether struggle gets noticed before it gets reported. The questions hold across veterinary medicine, accounting, communications, and education, because they are not about the work. They are about the conditions around the work.

When the system goes dark, someone still has to judge whether the placement is good. In practice, that someone is often the student. A nineteen-year-old in a new country, in a role they have not held before, asked to assess an organisation no one back home has looked at closely. They usually manage. That is not the same as it being fair.

The system was not built to see this. That is the gap. READY closes it.

The framework

Five dimensions.
Fifteen questions.
Evidence on every line.

Every question asks for something you can show. A name. A document you can put on the table. Not a story you can imagine.

R
Relationships
Who sits next to the intern at 9am? Not the signatory. The actual person.
E
Expectations
Are the goals written for this student? In a language they actually read?
A
Assignment
What is the intern doing on their first Monday? At 9am. Exactly.
D
Development
Can the organisation notice when a student struggles, before being told?
Y
You-factor
Are interns treated as people with a future, or as seasonal capacity?

"The Learning Agreement tells you what was agreed. READY tells you whether it will hold up on Monday morning."

Maarten Brand · The Internship Specialist
After the score

Not just whether to place.
But how to engage.

READY measures two things at once: willingness (how the organisation thinks about interns) and capacity (whether they can actually deliver). The combination tells you what kind of conversation to have next, even if you decide not to place.

Set standards
Willing + Capable
Place. This organisation can deliver. Use the conversation to set clear norms before the intern arrives, so that both sides know exactly what good looks like.
Remove friction
Willing, lower capacity
They want to do well. They lack structure. Help them build it: a check-in protocol, a backup contact, a week-three call. Most partners live here, and most are easy to support.
Set conditions
Capable, lower willingness
The structure is there. The commitment is not. Make placement conditional on written agreements: a named contact, a week-one check-in, a clear assignment. No flexibility on the conditions themselves.
Escalate
Low on both axes
Do not place. Or, if the placement is already running: escalate to your coordinator. This is not a difficult conversation. This is your duty of care, documented.

This tool supports your professional judgment. It does not replace it. READY helps you see clearly, name what you observe, and explain your decisions with evidence. The placement decision remains yours. Always.

"Problems in internships rarely appear suddenly. They become suddenly visible, because we lacked the language to name them earlier."
Maarten Brand · The Internship Specialist · 25 years of field experience
Three ways READY gets used

In a team session.
Across an international office.
After something has gone wrong.

01
In a team session
Everyone at the table scans a different partner organisation at the same time. The dashboard fills up in real time. The pattern that appears is almost always the same: one dimension is structurally weak across the room. That conversation is the session.
02
As a team instrument
Your international office gets a session-code for a defined period. Coordinators score the partners they are about to approve. The team meeting opens with a heatmap, not with a stack of forms.
03
After something has gone wrong
A placement ended early. A student went home. The colleagues are asking why. We use READY to score the organisation as it was, not as we remember it. The result is a document you can put on the table.
Request access

Get a session code for your team.

Tell me your name, your institution, and roughly what you want to use READY for. I send you a session code, a short guide, and a link you can share with your colleagues. From there, your team runs it. A workshop with me is an option, not a requirement.

Request a session code → Or book a workshop
Why a code, not a public link?
So I know who is using the instrument and can keep improving it. The code is yours, the scan is your team's.
Do I need a workshop?
No. Most teams run READY on their own. A workshop helps if you want to introduce it to a larger group, or work through the results together.