Whether you are on the 12 or 24 month training programme, the APC can be a challenging and stressful endeavour.
Here are some things you can do to keep on top of the workload!
APC Diary
The APC Diary can feel cumbersome at times. I found that keeping a physical diary and jotting down a few notes really helped me to keep on top of my APC Diary.
As you know, your daily work experience needs to be recorded and allocated to a specific competency. An example of the notes I would keep is as follows:
Competency: Design Economics and Cost Planning
Project: Example Project
Activity - Preparing a cost plan, pricing foundations for eastern section of building A, obtaining costs from cost database and listing on Cost X
Competency Management
It can be really overwhelming when you go through the pathway guide and look at all the things that you need to cover.
One action you can take to take a bit off your shoulders is to keep your own revision guide for the competencies. Bear with me here. All this involves is keeping a Microsoft Word document or a Notion workspace for each competency. You can then tick off which competencies you have covered.
The added benefit of this is that if you do a good job maintaining these notes, this will be your revision guide when you get closer to your assessment date!
Assessment Preparation
It's never too late to state preparing for your real assessment.
You can begin by day one by keeping your own question and answer log. Your firm or your counsellor should be able to provide you with sample questions sorted by competency. This will also serve as litmus test as you can test yourself to find weaknesses.
Keep a log of the questions that you struggle with. Use this log to enhance your notes on the topic and rehearse your answer delivery. I used to record myself delivering answers to questions to check whether I was making sense and not speaking too quickly.
Use your counsellor for this too - that's what they are there for!
That's all for this post folks - if you have any queries, please message me on LinkedIn.
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