Hi Daniel, it is definitely worth annotating as you have suggested as it helps you personally to hone your text and make it as hard hitting as possible.


As to whether you leave the annotations in place when submitting, my opinion is always that you should because it can help the assessors, however I understand that there are some assessors who do not appreciate it. So, definitely annotate, but I only recommend that you leave these annotations in place.

Hi Dan,


Putting annotations of the competences is a useful exercise so that at the end you can look through and check that each competence is included somewhere. It is also useful for your mentor or a PRA as you suggest, both to help them in reviewing but also so that they can check your own understanding of the competences.


With regard to leaving them in for the assessors, some assessors like it as it shows that the candidate is giving thought to the application while other assessors hate it as they look on it as the candidate trying to pre-empt/influence the assessment while they prefer to make their own judgement. The IET did a survey and the split was approximately 50/50, but from previous discussions I would suggest that the assessors who hate it do really hate it, so it is probably better to delete the annotations just prior to submission.


Best wishes for your application,


Alasdair

The other point some assessors have made is that if the candidate mis-identifies competences it can make their application look worse than it actually is. So for this reason and the points Alasdair makes I always recommend removing them in the final version.


Anyway, it's good for the writing of the application, if when you take the annotations out you feel the alignment to the competences isn't clear then it shows a slight tweak is needed - remember the application is one of the big bits of evidence of compliance to competence D!


Cheers,


Andy

It is best not to add these pointers. Good for you to assess your own evaluation of compliance.

For your application concentrate on simply showing how you have met the requirements of UKSPEC

Hi guys


The Competence reference notations are a good idea for the candidate when compiling their applications and as it has been said some Assessors/Interviewers love 'em and some don't. I personally don't; having undertaking the IET training courses to carry out the assessments and interviews I believe I know what I am looking for and when faced with the annotations I tend to ignore them. No harm is done - if the evidence of the 17 competences is there then I will tick the boxes.


Regards Jim W

Thanks folks, I think the general consensus is that for the final submission it's a good idea to omit, if only for the fact that such a high proportion dislike it. I will use it for the PRA and mentor reviews though.

Andy Millar‍ I hadn't considered this, misidentifying would probably undermine the application.

Alasdair Anderson‍ It's interesting to learn that there was actually a survey, even better to know it was a 50/50 split.


Thanks again

Some assessors really do hate this, but remember there are always 3 assessors on a panel.


Personally I'm fairly neutral, it can be useful especially if your application is long, but I regularly see competencies misidentified. This doesn't help but should not harm an application.


What I see very occasionally is an application that is directly referenced against the competencies, rather than an actual career history. This I would strongly advise against.


If I was applying now, I would certainly self-annotate as I wrote the career history to esnure I covered the bases and on balance I think I'd leave them in - they should never prejudice a panel even if misidentified and can help. At worst, as JW said, they get ignored.


BTW, they principal way to lose sympathy with an assessment panel is not to use a PRA. Assuming you are using a PRA, then between the 2 of you there should be no misidentifying.


Tim