Changelog

Status: in development. The effective date is set by the Academy when the standard is released; until then the published v2.0 Body of Knowledge and v1.0 framework remain the examined standard.

One version line

Before this release the framework was v1.0 (June 2026) and the Body of Knowledge was v2.0 (July 2026), each numbered on its own. They are one standard: the framework says what is examined, the Body of Knowledge teaches it, and the Exam Content Outlines say how each examination samples it. From v3.0 all three carry the same version and are revised together. Framework v2.0 does not exist; the number was skipped so that a version means one release everywhere it appears.

The framework: twenty-five competencies become twenty-nine

Five domains, equal weights and the five domain URLs are unchanged.

ID	Change	What changed and why
PL-1	Expanded	Adds decision rights as an explicit object: who may decide what, and how that authority is made visible. v1.0 treated delegation as handing off work; v3.0 treats it as designing who decides.
PL-2	Expanded	Names the difficult conversation as its own skill — the delayed, avoided or badly-run conversation is the failure mode the examinations most often test.
PL-3	Expanded	Adds assessing capability rather than tool access: interviews that measure what a candidate can do, not which tools (including AI assistants) they were allowed in the room.
PL-4	Kept	Unchanged in scope. Fair process is stated rather than implied.
PL-5	Expanded	Widened from the one-on-one to the whole growth path: promotion decisions, the senior individual-contributor track, and the choice between it and management.
PL-6	New	Built from the v2.0 Professional-altitude material of PL-1, PL-4 and PL-5, which described leading managers as a variant of leading engineers. It is a different job with its own failure modes, and now has its own competency.
DE-1	Kept	Unchanged.
DE-2	Sharpened	Re-stated around uncertainty. The competency is not producing accurate estimates; it is making commitments that are honest about what is not known.
DE-3	Expanded	Reliability as an ongoing responsibility joins incident response: service-level objectives, the on-call system, and what an organisation learns from failure.
DE-4	Kept	Unchanged.
DE-5	Expanded	Widened from choosing a process to designing the flow of work: developer experience and AI-assisted workflows are part of what a manager designs.
SV-1	Expanded	Adds writing it down. A strategy that exists only in conversation cannot be argued with, delegated against or checked.
SV-2	Expanded	From communicating decisions outward to partnering: the relationship with product, design and executives is two-way.
SV-3	Kept	Unchanged.
SV-4	Expanded	Renamed from resource allocation and build-vs-buy to engineering economics: cost of delivery, budgets and headcount, vendors, and a third option beside build and buy.
SV-5	Expanded	Adds interpretation and the measurement of AI impact, where the pressure to show a number is strongest and the numbers are least settled.
SV-6	New	Built from the v2.0 Expert-altitude material of PL-1, which treated organisational structure as the executive form of delegation. Designing the organisation and leading it through change is a strategic competency and sits in Strategy & Vision.
TJ-1	Kept	Unchanged.
TJ-2	Kept	Unchanged.
TJ-3	Expanded	Adds standards for AI-generated code: what review must establish when the author did not write every line.
TJ-4	Merged	v1.0 TJ-4 (staying technically credible) and TJ-5 (judging when to intervene) are one judgment: you can only decide when to step in if you are close enough to see, and staying close is only worth it for the decisions it enables.
TJ-5	New	AI-assisted engineering: how an organisation adopts AI assistance, governs its use, builds the capability to use it well, and manages the risks. No v1.0 competency covered it. The ID TJ-5 is reused for a different competency; the v1.0 TJ-5 lives on inside v3.0 TJ-4.
TJ-6	New	Security, privacy and compliance as engineering responsibilities. v1.0 left them implicit inside quality and risk.
CC-1	Kept	Unchanged.
CC-2	Kept	Unchanged.
CC-3	Kept	Unchanged.
CC-4	Expanded	Adds distributed and hybrid teams, where recognition and pace are hardest to see.
CC-5	Expanded	From modelling values to exercising ethical judgment: the situations where stated values and the pressure of the moment point in different directions.
CC-6	New	Self-management: the manager's own time, energy, boundaries and resilience. No v1.0 competency addressed the manager as the object.

The Body of Knowledge: one text per competency

v2.0 wrote each competency as core concepts followed by three altitude bands — At Associate, At Professional, At Expert. v3.0 replaces the seventy-five bands with one unified text per competency, structured identically across all twenty-nine, and moves the treatment of altitude into a single chapter, How Judgment Scales. Nothing substantive from v2.0 is dropped; band material is de-duplicated and re-homed, most visibly the "developing managers" content into PL-6 and "designing ownership through structure" into SV-6.

Every unit section and every principle has a permanent anchor (PL-1.P3), so the standard can be cited at the level of a single claim. Every named model carries an evidence grade — [research], [practice] or [contested] — and every source is a real, checkable work in one bibliography.

The v2.0 text remains readable, unchanged, in the archive.

Exam Content Outlines: new

Published for the first time, one per certification. Each states the examination's specification, the number of questions each competency carries, the proficiency indicators a certified holder meets, the scenario contexts questions draw on, the cognitive mix, what the examination does not assess, and the traceability of every competency to the Body of Knowledge. The EMA-I outline is complete; the EMP-II and EME-III outlines are complete drafts and say so until those examinations open.

Governance

A governance chapter states the separation of study material from examination development, the release cadence (annual major, quarterly minor), the public-comment process for major versions, the review statement, and the licence.

Credentials

Credentials record the framework version they were examined against. Every credential issued before the v3.0 effective date carries 1.0; the verification page and the verification API show it. Existing credentials are unaffected in every other respect.

Retired

The document's former four-letter acronym, which collided with another body's long-standing one. The document is the Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge, short form EMA Body of Knowledge.
The Preparing for the Exams chapter. Its guidance is carried by each Exam Content Outline's opening section and by the per-certification reading paths generated from the outlines.
The altitude-band structure, as above.

EMA Standard v3.0