Hello folks 👋
I’ve taken a bit of a break this summer. I’ve just come back from a 2 week holiday, i’m feeling refreshed and i’m ready to finish this year on a high.
Im in the final stages of my APC and things are starting to get intense. When you get closer to your final interview, here’s a few things you need to get ready:
Diary - Ensure your diary is complete and up to date. Use a cut off date and ensure your diary reflects a breadth of experience across your competencies.
Summary of Experience - Your summary of experience needs to be carefully drafted to reflect your work. Your supervisor and counsellor will help you with this but it should contain information that you know like the back of your hand. If you have a 5 year career, and of that career you have one year of JCT contract experience versus 4 years of NEC experience, your SoE needs to read in such a way that the assessors know that your workload is NEC based and therefore their questioning will be reflective of this. In my case, it required a lot drafting and re-drafting so take your time with this!
CPD - Ensure that your CPD Log is up to date. I have been advised to revise the topics i’ve mentioned as part of my CPD as assessors could potentially ask questions on what was covered as part of it.
Case Study - This is a significant part of the APC. You will have to submit a 3k report and deliver a 10 minute presentation which will be interrogated by the assessment panel. I have received the following advice so far:
Draft the report in such a way that a demonstrates a challenge that you faced. It shouldn’t give the impression that you’re just undertaking a normal part of your job like a valuation etc. Identify the issue, and then present the steps that you took to address the situation.
Follow the case structure as identified in the candidate guide: 1. Introduction 2. My Approach 3. My Achievements 4. Conclusion
Get as many people as you can to review and provide questions! In theory, your assessment will be undertaken by professionals who operate in the same field as you. However, there is a chance due to assessor shortages that someone completely unknown will be assessing you. Therefore, to get a breadth of questions, send your case study to different people so you can see what angles they can question you on!
Draft model answers for all the questions you receive on your case study. The more mock assessments you do, the bigger your bank of questions will be!
Revision - You need to ensure you are revising key topics. A lot of your revision can be fed from your summary of experience and your case study. For example, if your case study is about an issue with respect to variations you should know the variation rules for your contract, the processes etc. Your revision will also be dictated by mock assessments - this will help you identify
I will make a more detailed post about the whole APC process in due course, but that’s all for now folks. If you have any queries please drop me a message.
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