The three types
Assessment
Before wording comes substance. An assessment is recorded in sections — the tasks performed, the quality of the work, the way of working, conduct towards colleagues and external parties — with a rating per section. Assessment content is supplied by the people who actually worked with the person. The platform’s job is to make sure it is complete and consistent before it becomes prose.Tone and the Grundton
Swiss certificate language is a convention with real legal weight: the phrase chosen for the overall verdict is understood by every reader in the country. The module makes that convention explicit instead of leaving it to whoever is drafting. A 1–10 Grundton maps onto the standard German formulations:
Choosing a Grundton means choosing what every Swiss reader will understand you to have
said. Making the mapping visible is the point: it prevents both accidental damage and
accidental over-praise.
The certificate must be truthful and benevolent — both at once. That is the Swiss standard,
and it is why the module pairs an honest assessment with a deliberate, explicit choice of wording
rather than a free-text box.
Templates and variables
Certificates are generated from DOCX templates with placeholder variables, mapped from the employee record and the assessment: identity, the sequence of functions and dates drawn from the employment periods, the tasks, and the assessment prose. Role templates provide a starting point per function — the standard task description for a primary teacher, an administrator, a caretaker — so each certificate starts from something accurate rather than from a blank page.The lifecycle
A certificate moves through an explicit status machine, so at any moment it is clear whose turn it is:
Two review stages rather than one is deliberate: HR checks the wording against
convention, and the supervisor checks that the wording still matches their assessment.
The certificate also records the signer name and title — configurable, because the
person who signs an Arbeitszeugnis is often the school principal rather than whoever
operated the system — and, where relevant, an exit category that drives the closing
sentence (the Schlusssatz), which Swiss readers weigh as carefully as the Gesamturteil.
Employees can raise a request themselves through the portal, with a reason. Versions are
kept, so a corrected certificate does not overwrite the record of what was issued.
Delivery is through the portal. Access is checked per request against the certificate’s
own access tokens — a certificate URL is never a shared secret. The employee is notified
when theirs is ready, and per-certificate notification preferences control which of
those notifications fire.
Permissions
Certificates carry an assessment of a person, so access is narrower than general employee data.SYSTEM_ADMIN has no certificate access at all — it is a technical
operations role, and a certificate is about as far from technical operations as a
record gets.