Let’s Get Chartered! 2
Welcome to the second instalment of 'Let's Get Chartered!'. A series of tips and insights designed to help others specialising in Daylight, Sunlight and Rights of Light (and potentially those in other areas of surveying!) in their RICS Assessment of Professional Competence (APC) journey, based on our lived experience of the APC process.
The second instalment of the series is about the APC submission requirements and RICS Assessment Platform. The final assessment interview will be covered later.
APC Submission Documents
📃 Summary of Experience – A brief statement about each selected mandatory and technical competency to Level 1, 2 or 3. There is a maximum word limit of 1,500 for mandatory competencies and 4,000 for technical competencies, totaling 5,500.
📃 Case Study – With a maximum word limit of 3,000, the case study must be based on a project you have been involved with in the two years prior to your assessment and provides a critical appraisal of your work. A 10-minute presentation on your case study and associated questioning is a key element of the final assessment interview, so be sure to select a project you know very well and demonstrates a range of your competencies.
📃 Work Experience Record/Diary (if completing a structured training route) – A record of your day-to-day experience at the required competency levels.
📃 CPD Record – A log of all relevant CPD undertaken in the year or two prior to assessment depending on your route to membership. CPD for APC candidates must total at least 48 hours per year and at least 50% must be "formal” learning.
✅ Professionalism Module – Candidates are required to complete this module within the RICS Assessment Platform in the year prior to assessment and it must be repeated if the final assessment interview is not successfully completed within that time.
RICS Assessment Platform
A secure online platform that RICS uses for managing all elements of assessment for candidates, counsellors, assessors and training managers. All elements of the APC submission are submitted via the platform, as well as details of your counsellor, proposer and seconders, employment history and competency selection. Reasonable adjustments can also be applied for via the platform.
Tips from Founder and Director Emily Forth MRICS for preparing APC submission documents:
👍 Assessors want to know what you did, not what you asked others to do. Keep this in mind when preparing your submission.
👍 Submissions are treated as confidential by APC assessors but confidentiality is an essential consideration for candidates, whether it be obtaining consent from clients to use their projects or anonymising your submission so that clients and projects cannot be identified. This is particularly important for Rights of Light candidates as projects are often highly confidential pre-planning, or may have been/have the potential to become litigious.
👍 Don’t exceed the maximum word count. RICS has the right to cancel assessments where submissions are found to be over the word limit.
👍 Your submission will be reviewed holistically by the assessors, so try to ensure cohesiveness between the elements of your submission to demonstrate your overall competence.
👍 Check your spelling and grammar! It's an easy thing to get right, so make sure you allow time for these basic checks when preparing your submission.
👍 Don’t plagiarise! Obvious, of course, but just don’t do it (submissions are checked).
Watch this space for the next instalment of 'Let's Get Chartered!', coming soon 👀