RICS Assessment of Professional Competence
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors promotes and enforces the highest professional credentials and standards in land, real estate, building, and infrastructure development and management. RICS professionals do a wide range of work.
How to Write a Case Study for APC?
It's difficult to write about yourself, but this is your chance to shine!
The entire APC process, including the case study, is intended to demonstrate how you react to a brief. So keep in mind that your case study is about you and your accomplishments, not a technical explanation of a project.
At its most basic level, your case study must:
- Reflect your specific APC pathway
- Focus on a real-world project that you were substantially involved in or led on
- Highlight major difficulties on this project; analyse a variety of viable options in detail
- And explain how and why the final solution was chosen
Candidates often make mistakes, so make sure you avoid making these mistakes:
- Not properly understanding what the RICS assessment team is looking for
- Failing to identify and analyse the important concerns
- Not providing enough relevant advice are just a few of the most obvious faults.
How to select your case study?
Not only must you write a case study about a project, but you must also give a presentation and answer questions about it. Because you'll be devoting so much time and attention to one project, picking the proper one can be difficult. The scenarios below should assist you in the process.
Advice on how to choose your case study, how to make the most of your 3000-word limit, and how to avoid the most typical pitfalls during your APC final assessment interview.
1. Case study writing
You've chosen your case study, completed all of the necessary research (or are still doing so), and are now ready to write. Unfortunately, there is no secret formula, but the suggestions below should help you make the most of your 3000-word restriction and have the panel anxiously turning pages and anticipating your presentation.
2. Key Issues
Because your case study will be structured around the primary issues, choose topics that will allow you to demonstrate your abilities.
3. Issues vs. normal decisions and processes
Make sure you're focusing on real problems rather than a decision you had to make. If you're working on a building project, for example, deciding the form of contract to use is more of a typical procedure. A major concern is your client gaining access to the site late at night and poking about while no one is present.
4. Consider your options
Take time to review your notes and reflect on the entire project before selecting your primary issue(s). Were there any abnormalities – an unexpected incident or action? What was your most difficult day on the project, and why was it so difficult? It can be difficult to forget the times when you had to struggle in dealing with the project.
5. Get a different perspective
You can become overly invested in a project and lose sight of the forest for the trees. Contact a mentor or a colleague who isn't involved in the project and have a conversation with them about it. Their questioning and outsider viewpoint can frequently assist you in seeing things in a new light and bringing to light the most important issues.
Conclusion
This phase of the case study can be difficult. This is the time to review any areas where you excelled or would change things if you could go back in time. Speaking with your supervisor about your performance is a great method to get constructive feedback that can help you improve.
But keep in mind that this is about how you feel about your work; "my supervisor thought I did well" would not suffice.
Editing the Case Study
While your case study is limited to 3000 words, you will be required to make a presentation to illustrate your project in further detail. While refining your case study, this is the greatest time to start working on your presentation.
After you've finished your early draft, look over it with a highlighter and mark up any areas that could be deleted and reused in the presentation. You'll know which portions to remove if you go over the word limit.
I'd then suggest having your supervisor and counsellor read through the document and provide feedback. Inquire about the questions raised by the case study, since you may want to address some of them in your presentation or anticipate being asked similar ones. Finally, consider what questions you want to be asked - might you alter sections to inspire these questions without jeopardising the case study's readability?
Typical blunders are
- Timing: You may fondly recall a project from the early 2000s and wish to relive it through your case study, but you must choose a much more recent piece of work - your case study must be completed within two years of the date of your evaluation.
- The word limit is for reference only. It's a limit, and you must adhere to it.
- There are simply too many important issues: The word limit is obviously limited, so don't have too many if you want to give your most important topics adequate attention.
- Disregarding the instruction manual: The Candidate Guide functions similarly to a cheat sheet. If you don't continuously refer to it, you might forget something important.
- Capturing numerous competencies and levels: Your case study serves as a tool for illustrating how you've progressed to greater levels of different competencies. Make sure you pick a project where you can demonstrate this in your role. You may not be able to show off those level 3s if the project or role is too straightforward.
- Spelling & Grammarly: Treat your case study as if it were a formal report, with proper spelling and language. Check for spelling and punctuation errors, and have someone else read it through to make sure it flows properly.
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