How To Become Competent

So let’s think about it. Let’s think about the practice. How important is the practice? The practice, if you think about it, is something which is fundamental to demonstrating some competence. I I’ll just tell you, but using an example, during the covid crisis in the U.K what happened was I was watching one of these interviews and this interview was given by one of the members of parliament and this member of parliament, have background in that she’s a medical doctor. And one of the interviewers What she asked, how was is she going to go out there to help during this time of the pandemic? And her answer was, it’s not as straightforward as that. Because she has been out of practice, out of practice for some time. She can’t go directly to do some practice as a medical practitioner, what she needs to do is to regain some of the skills that’s how important it is.

So what do you need to do in order to maintain competence? What you need to do is to keep on practicing and practicing. So that’s why you see athletes, for example, what they do in order to maintain their competence? What they do is keep on practicing, keep on practicing so that they can maintain that level of competence. So as an APC candidate, what do you do to maintain that level of practice? One of the things that you can do is at your place of work, obviously, you are assigned some of the projects and using those projects, you can look at different competencies and make sure that you maintain those levels of competence by keeping on practicing.

So what I’ve done is summarized for you different areas where you can do some practicing. Let’s just look at some of these. So in order to develop practical skills, what you have to do is to do some practice that we have just talked about. So what are the things that you can do, the first thing is experience from projects. So this would be practice based on the projects that you have been assigned. That are within your portfolio, but the issue is that those projects that are within your portfolio might not necessarily cover all the skills. So in order to ensure that you’ve got a broad base of skills, what you need to do is look at the second point, which is learn from some mentors. So we are talking about working with some mentors because your mentors, won’t be working on other projects so they can take you through and tell you or you learn from them how they approach and resolved it in problems, so that’s how you learn. Another thing is that in the office environment that you’re in, it might be that for that particular year, you don’t have any relevant projects that you can live from in order to proved certain skills. These third way you can do it, you can emulate case studies from previous projects.

So the third thing is emulating case studies from previous projects and this is very important, even if you have all the required projects, is worthwhile undertaking this exercise about emulating case studies from previous projects. The reason for that is that if you think about it, one of the requirements of the RICS is that what do you need to do is to demonstrate that you’ve learned all these practical skills and that you’re able to practice these skills at level three, which is actually giving reasoned advice.

So first of all, that reasoned advice is actually given based on the project that you’re working on, that’s the first part of call. But then as you go into practice, you’re expected to use these practical skills in order to apply them into new situations. So by doing this simple exercise of emulating case studies from other projects, you are using the skills that you have and applying it to situations that you have not dealt with before, so that’s a very good practice that you can engage yourself in by looking at some case studies of other projects that had something to do with the office or external and look at the way you approach it to solve those practical problems.

So in summary, what we have talked about is that in order to develop competence, what do you need to do is to have the Knowledge that’s number one. Number two, you have to Develop these Practical Skills. And number three is Practice. Without practice, nothing happens, so in order to prepare yourself what you need to do is keep on practicing, practicing you have to learn in a similar way that athletes do in order to develop competence. They keep on practicing every day and similarly in your case, in order to go ahead with your APC, which is just the starting point. Because this leads to the rest of your career, what you need to do is keep on practicing.

Thank you for listening looking forward to helping you in this journey. So that you become qualified as a chartered surveyor. Thank you.