Exam Tools - Public Holiday Impact Tracker

Exam Planning Tools - Public Holiday Impact Tracker

Welcome to our exam planning tool – the VICTVS Public Holiday Impact Tracker.

Our Holiday Impact Tracker has been designed to provide an easy to understand visual representation of how open for business any country is on any given day of the year.

We have developed this tool to help our operations teams and the awarding organisations that we work with, plan high-stakes professional exams all over the world.

We hope that this tool will be useful for exam officers, exam managers, invigilators and anyone else who needs practical information to help them plan their global operations.

Using the Public Holiday Impact Tracker
To use our Holiday Impact Tracker, simply select a date on the calendar in the top left corner of the map, and the mapping will display the level of economic activity in all countries on the selected day.

When developing this tool, we decided that a simple traffic light system would be the best place to start. The colour coding is explained below:

Green – Full Economic Activity. The country is open for business within normal operating limits.
Amber – Medium Economic Activity. This indicates that a country may have moderately limited business, for example on a weekend day in the UK.
Red – Limited Economic Activity. Countries showing red are experiencing a significant reduction in business, due to a public holiday or other significant event.

Active Daylight Tracking

On our map, you can also see the time zones as they affect each country. If you are assessing the global economic activity for today’s date, then the time zones will display active shading that moves each hour to show which parts of the world are in daylight hours and in darkness.

Preemptive Display

You can also see the upcoming global impact shown as a small bar chart beneath the date. This feature has been designed to provide a quick reference early warning system for any upcoming large-scale holiday impacts, however this can also be useful for indicating monthly trends.

Making the Holiday Impact Tracker

This tool was created in early 2019 and all of the data used was researched and collated by our Project Assistant Silvia Pellegri.

To create this tool involved identifying and categorising over 70,000 individual data points.

Because of the scale of the task and the way in which country and state authorities can vary public holidays with little notice, our Holiday Impact Tracker is a live project that is constantly being updated and improved. Whilst we have tried to ensure that all of the data gathered is as accurate as possible, there may be some errors or omissions.

Contribute

If you spot any inconsistencies or errors in our holiday impact tracker, please do leave a comment or contact us below to let us know.

We have already planned a number of additional data layers that we will be building into the map over the coming months – all of which are designed to assist in planning global operations and we would be very pleased to receive your help and advice.

The data visualisation technology behind our Holiday Impact Tracker was built for us by our local digital mapping experts Parallel (also based in Leeds in the UK). You can read more about their work by visiting their website here.