Running out of time – big mistake number one

There’s something you can do, and do easily, that can have a catastrophic impact on your Training Quality Standard application. It’s a big mistake, possibly the biggest of all, and it’s one from which it is almost impossible to recover.

It’s the mistake of allowing yourself to run out of time.

When you begin to think about writing your application you’re probably relatively relaxed. Writing your organisation’s application might be a big task but, as you tell yourself at this stage, you have weeks in which to do the job . . . and a week is a long time.

Yet, the hours and the days and the weeks are eaten up. There are other priorities, emergencies, and all sorts of calls on your time. Before you know where you are, you are running out of time, and you still have the application to write.

Of course, when you realise what’s happening, you start writing, but by now you’ve lost a lot of the available time. In some cases you might only be a few days away from the submission deadline. For some people this realisation means they end up writing right up to the last minute.

This approach doesn’t help you to write a good application.

Get things right when you come to write your application. Start early. Create a writing schedule. Get a draft done quickly. Leave yourself time – and lots of it – to review and to rewrite.

Do all of these things and you’ll avoid big mistake number one.