The Raspberry Company
Tech IQ is a workplace digital competency platform built on a simple refusal: reading about a thing is not evidence you can do it. Candidates work a simulated office and are assessed on what they actually did.
Every job description says “proficient with common office software”. Almost none of them says what that means, and nothing anywhere establishes whether it is true.
Nobody puts “I am not sure what the cloud is” on a CV, and nobody is asked. The first evidence is usually a file that cannot be found, a link shared with the wrong people, or a spreadsheet total that was wrong for a month.
A completion rate tells you somebody clicked through. It does not tell you they can find a file they saved last Tuesday, or that they would notice a message asking them to change banking details.
Self-assessment is close to useless here, in both directions. The people who rate themselves lowest are frequently fine; the people most sure of themselves are the ones forwarding the invoice.
None of this is a failing of the people doing the work. It is a failing of every attempt to measure it, which has asked them what they know instead of watching what they do.
Not a score out of a hundred that averages a strength against a gap. Each domain is reported on its own, with the evidence behind it and how recent that evidence is.
The mental model underneath everything else — what a device, an application, a window, an account and a setting actually are, and why a restart so often works.
Where things go and how to get them back. Saving, naming, moving, finding, versioning, and the difference between a copy and the original.
Correct mental models for the words everyone uses — internet, cloud, server, API, VPN, encryption, IoT — at the level a non-technical professional genuinely benefits from.
Observe, isolate, test, fix, verify, escalate. Enough to solve the simple things, avoid making anything worse, and hand IT a useful report when it is not simple.
Email, chat, meetings and calendars — the mechanics, and the judgment about which channel, which recipients, and what tone.
Working in the same document as other people without losing anyone’s work: sharing, permissions, comments, co-editing, version history and shared drives.
Producing work that reads well and survives contact with other people: structure, headings, tables, PDFs, printing, scanning, forms and signatures.
Rows, columns, sorting, filtering, a handful of formulas, a chart that does not mislead — and the habit of asking whether the data is any good.
The defensive behaviours that actually prevent incidents: passwords, MFA, recognising a phish, handling attachments and links, locking devices, and reporting quickly.
Knowing what is confidential, who is allowed to see it, how it should travel, and what to do in the first ten minutes after it goes somewhere it should not.
What these systems are, what they are confidently wrong about, what must never be pasted into them, and where the human remains accountable for the output.
The assistive features already on every device, and how to produce documents, messages and meetings that everybody on the team can actually use.
They answer different questions and are priced, timed and weighted differently on purpose.
Twenty minutes
An adaptive diagnostic of 16 items, 4 of them worked in the simulator rather than answered. It places somebody across the 12 domains and points at what to do next.
A working day
Nine to four at a simulated company. 126 segments across 14 days in the pool, 361 assessed goals, and one continuous world — the file you save at nine is the file somebody asks for at eleven.
Between them sit 10 signature labs: 54 goals of deliberate practice on the things the diagnostic found, worked in the same simulator the Road Test uses.
Try one
The sheet is open in front of you: 34 rows, 6 columns, nothing unusual on screen. You have four minutes. What do you do?
The Road Test · An ordinary Tuesday
That is what makes this easy to get wrong. This is the opening segment of a Road Test day, exactly as it plays in the product: the brief a candidate reads, the goals they are marked against, and what the marks are for.
Priya has sent you the draft meeting agenda and asked you to file it where the operations team can find it. She needs it in the shared team area, named so people know what it is. She has also asked you to get the half-hour pre-brief in the diary — her, Liam and you, this morning. The attachment is in the message. Open it, then put it somewhere sensible.
Nothing announces which parts are being marked. There is a mail client, a file browser, a document editor and a calendar, and the day simply starts.
Assessed in this segment
Segment total62
If it is missed
The meeting went into a slot somebody was already committed to, or without both of them invited. The invitation arrives either way — which is exactly why looking first is the competency rather than a nicety. Somebody now has two things at once, and the person who has to untangle it is them.
That is the whole difference this product is built on. Four of the five things asked here are ordinary competence. The fifth is worth the most, and it is the one the software will happily let somebody get wrong.
The obvious question
Often you should. These are categories rather than products, because what can be said fairly without inspecting somebody else’s software is what a category is for. The real choice is between ways of working, not between two logos.
A line on a CV
“Proficient with common office software.” Self-assessed, never checked, and the two people least alike in ability write it identically.
Reports 12 domains separately, each with the evidence behind it and how recent that evidence is. The record makes the claim, not the candidate.
A compliance module
Exists to be finished and recorded. The output is a completion date, which answers whether somebody sat through it.
Refuses to treat completion as capability. Reading a lesson can reach Learned and no further: only a simulation or an assessment can produce Demonstrated, and the engine enforces that instead of trusting whoever wrote the lesson.
An interview question
“How are you with spreadsheets?” Answers the question of how confident somebody is, which is close to useless in both directions.
A 14-day Road Test pool assessing 361 goals in a continuous working day, with 131 ways to lose marks for doing something plausible and wrong.
A computer-literacy certification
A fixed syllabus, examined once, and valid from then on. It answers what somebody could do on the day they sat it, which is a real answer to a different question.
Holds a dated record and lets it age. The same person is reported as current in one domain and ageing in another, because that is what the evidence says.
A skills test
Measures a narrow task under artificial conditions, in one sitting. A candidate who has seen the format before scores the same as one who understands the work.
10 signature labs set in a working computer with real consequences, plus a diagnostic that adapts instead of marching everybody through the same items.
Training on the tools you happen to use
Teaches where the buttons are in one product. Useful until the product changes, or the person moves to an organisation that bought a different one.
Teaches the mental model underneath, so it survives the interface changing: what a file, an account, a permission and a link actually are. That is why the fast-moving domains carry shorter half-lives than the foundational ones.
Assuming it will be fine
Costs nothing until it does. The first evidence is usually a file nobody can find, a link shared with the wrong people, or an invoice paid to an attacker.
Is allowed to report that evidence has gone stale instead of counting a two-year-old pass as current, so the gap is visible before it is expensive.
Twelve domains by four stages, so somebody can be a confident user of spreadsheets and still be at the essentials on security, which is what people are actually like.
Stage 1
The floor. Nothing here is optional in a modern workplace.
12 lessons
Stage 2
The everyday tools, used correctly rather than approximately.
12 lessons
Stage 3
Independent. You solve it, or you escalate it well.
12 lessons
Stage 4
Faster and safer than the people around you, and able to show them how.
12 lessons
Alongside them, 11 lessons for non-technical leaders over the same twelve domains: cyber risk, procurement, supplier management, data governance, AI approval, shadow IT, continuity, why projects fail. Every one framed as a management decision. None of them teaches anybody to configure anything, and the product’s own test suite enforces that boundary.
Each one is a situation rather than an exercise, with four difficulty modes, a three-level hint ladder, penalties for the plausible wrong move, and a debrief that explains what the wrong move would have cost.
Twelve files, no structure, and a colleague who has to find things tomorrow.
Nine messages. Some are fine. Not all of the bad ones look bad.
Four requests, one of which is not a meeting.
Five documents, five audiences. Find the narrowest access that still does the job.
Four questions, 240 rows, and a table with two things wrong with it.
A meeting in six minutes and no sound. What do you check first?
A fluent, confident, well-structured answer. Which parts of it would you stake your name on?
The contents page will not generate. Work out why.
Two copies of the same form. Only one of them can be filled in.
Four fluent, accurate descriptions. Only one of them is alt text.
Including the part most vendors leave until you ask.
The whole simulated workplace (the file manager, the mail client, the spreadsheet, the documents, the permissions dialogues) is the web page. No plugin, no agent, no admin rights, nothing for IT to package. It works on a locked-down machine because it is not asking the machine for anything.
Progress and evidence live in the browser’s own storage. Nothing about how somebody performed is transmitted anywhere by the act of doing it, which is not a privacy policy: it is the shape of the thing.
Lessons and labs fit around work. The Road Test does not: it is a continuous simulated day, sat in one sitting, because a morning decision is what the afternoon is built on.
Not a number out of a hundred. Each of the 12 domains is reported on its own, with what produced the score and how recent it is. Evidence ages, so a competency demonstrated two years ago is reported as ageing, not counted as current.
Team and organisation views aggregate the same evidence, and refuse to render below the cohort floor set out under “What Tech IQ is not”. That floor is not configurable.
There is no payment integration, no SSO, and no LMS connector. The content lifecycle and the scenario-authoring contract are real and enforced, but their editorial interfaces are not built. If any of those decide your purchase, they should decide it now rather than in month three.
The Digital Driver’s Licence requires demonstrated attainment in all 12 domains and a Road Test pass. Here is what stands behind that.
The engine refuses to record Demonstrated from any source that is not a simulation. A learner could complete every lesson in the product with full marks and still not hold the credential. That is a rule in code, not a policy in a brochure.
The Road Test is 14 days of 126 segments in one continuous world. Each day independently assesses all 12 domains. “The other days cover it” is no answer to somebody who did not sit those days.
The day follows your attempt number, so a retake is never the day you just sat and there is nothing to reroll. 14 days means 13 retakes before anything repeats.
All 14 days and every lab are driven to completion through the real command layer on each run: the same commands a candidate’s clicks produce. A goal no competent solution can reach is a defect, and it has been caught that way more than once.
131 penalties across the pool, and each is driven deliberately to confirm it fires. A test where the careless route scores the same as the careful one is not measuring care.
Every figure here is read out of the product’s own data files at build time. No one types them. If the product changes and this page is not regenerated, the build fails rather than quietly going stale.
Where the evidence goes
Tech IQ has no backend. Progress and evidence live in the browser’s own storage, and the product contains no fetch, no XMLHttpRequest, no WebSocket and no beacon. Not disabled, not configurable off, absent. Watching somebody work is not a feature that has been withheld; it is a thing the software cannot do.
This site’s build checks that. If a network call is ever added to the product, the page you are reading fails to build rather than carrying on making a promise the code no longer keeps.
Whether everybody can use it
A product that assesses digital competency and excludes disabled people from taking part has failed at its own subject. So the work is real: reflow verified at 200% zoom including the window manager, two independent high-contrast ramps, and a keyboard route for every drag-and-drop interaction in the simulator. The audit figures are under “What Tech IQ is not” below, stated with the tool and the date.
And the honest part: automated tooling covers roughly a third to a half of the success criteria, and none of the judgment-shaped ones. Testing with real screen-reader users has not happened yet. Until it has, “conformant” is a word this product has not earned — and a vendor who says it before that work is done is telling you what they have not measured.
The same standard the credential holds candidates to: 12 domains, all demonstrated, or it is not issued. It would be a strange product that applied that rule to its learners and not to itself.
A product whose whole argument is do not certify what has not been demonstrated has to hold itself to it first. These are the limits, stated before you ask.
It is not a government licence.
It is an educational credential issued by The Raspberry Company: not accredited, not regulated, not required to operate anything. The metaphor is used because it is legible, tested doing the thing instead of present at a course, and a metaphor that useful must not be allowed to become a misrepresentation.
It is not IT training.
No scripting, no server administration, no networking, no cloud engineering. Tech IQ is about the digital work an ordinary job actually contains, and the product’s own test suite fails the build if that boundary is crossed.
It is not a monitoring tool.
No behavioural telemetry reaches any employer surface. Simulation events are a closed list, and organisational readiness is refused for any cohort under five people, so no aggregate can be read back to an individual.
It does not claim WCAG conformance.
It targets WCAG 2.2 AA and says so. Measured with axe-core 4.10.2 on 18 September 2026: zero violations across all fourteen pages, in all four theme ramps, at both desktop and phone widths. That is the floor, not the ceiling. Automated tooling covers a fraction of the criteria and none of the judgment-shaped ones, and testing with real screen-reader users has not happened. Claiming conformance before it has would be the exact error this product exists to argue against.
The fastest way to understand this is to watch a working day being assessed: where the marks come from, what a wrong move costs, and what the report says afterwards.
Walkthroughs run about forty minutes. Bring the person in your organisation who is most sceptical that any of this can be measured; that conversation is more useful than the demo.
Or open it now and sit one yourself. Open the running product — the real application, not a cut-down preview. No account, nothing to install, and everything it records stays in your own browser.
Tell us the size of the group and what you are trying to find out. We will reply with times.
No mail client? Write to matt@theraspberry.ca. This form composes a message in your own mail client — nothing you type here is transmitted by this page.
No newsletter, no drip sequence, and your address is not passed to anybody. If you decide against it, saying so ends the correspondence.