Memorisation, Repetition and Delivery.
These are three most important processes you will train during your APC.
As I’ve mentioned previously, the best way to prepare for the final assessment is to partake in question and answer mini assessments. These could be held by your counsellor or other colleagues.
The purpose of this activity is replicate a pressured environment where you have to recall and demonstrate your competency. It sounds simple enough but there is massive breadth and depth of knowledge that you need to know as chartered surveyor – and you need to know it well.
It will take a while (at least 12 months) to properly learn everything.
If you’ve never received a “grilling” or at least witnessed one, it can be pretty brutal depending on the personalities involved. Throughout your APC you will come across people who have a chip on their shoulder or are just straight up nasty. Just remember, there are more good members of the RICS than there are bad ones.
How to schedule your assessments
For your mini assessments, I would recommend isolating the assessment to specific competencies. For example you could ask your counsellor to spend an hour testing you on Construction Technology. This has two benefits:
In the real assessment, the assessor won’t spend longer than 5 minutes on a competency. If you spend an hour on a competency, you should be able to cover a large percentage of the possible questions they might ask you. This will give you the opportunity to rehearse the answers to the possible questions and therefore be in an advantageous position.
If you are at the beginning of your APC process, there is a chance that you don’t really have significant experiences across the other competencies, so by doing it one at a time it gives you the opportunity to build some practical experience over a period of months.
For the technical competencies there are three levels, you might suggest that you are tested on the specific levels on a periodic basis.
What about the mandatory competencies?
The skills required as part of your mandatory competencies are part of your day to day work. Things like Communication and Data Management should be relatively straight forward for you to study and prepare for.
I would schedule an assessment for these every 2 months.
How should you treat the mini assessment?
The assessments need to reflect the intensity of a real APC assessment. Over time you will get accustomed to the questioning style of your APC counsellor, so it's a good idea to try and get assessments in whether people.
You don't know who your assessors will be on the day, so the more varied questioning styles you can experience the better.
During the assessment, try and record the call. Seek permission from your counsellor first, and after the assessment analyse the questions. Make notes on the questions you got wrong - and practice these.
If your assessment doesn't go well - be easy on yourself. The whole point of these assessments are to prepare you for the real thing. You might get assessors sometimes who are very direct, and the experience might leave a sour taste in your mouth.
The truth is that that you will be grateful for these assessors after you have passed.
That's all for this post folks - if you have any questions just give me a message on LinkedIn.
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