Congratulations, your written application has been assessed as meeting the Chartered standard and you have been contacted by the APM and invited to select a date for your Chartered Project Professional interview. Well done. Not everyone makes it this far!
You will have some flexibility in the date that you choose for interview but it is important to bear in mind that the ChPP is operated as a series of application ‘windows’. Each ‘window’ has a target date for submission together with a corresponding date on which the results will all be released together.
The Chartered Team will encourage you to move swiftly by offering you dates that fall within the planned timings for your application window. We would normally advise you to allow yourself at least three weeks between notification of Stage 1 success and sitting your interview. This will be needed to prepare yourself fully. On the flip side, don’t wait too long. It is better to keep up the momentum.
The interview process differs depending on the route that you have chosen to follow. For the Technical Knowledge and Professional Practice Pathway (formerly Route 2) the interview process involves a relatively simple review of your continuing professional development as both your technical and professional knowledge have already been demonstrated. We won’t explore this any further within this post.
For both the Experiential Pathway (formerly Route 3) and Technical Knowledge Pathway (formerly Route 1) the interviews are much more intensive.
The aim of the stage 2 interview is to verify and validate the evidence in your your written application. For the Experiential Pathway, the interview will also explore your broader technical knowledge.
The assessors will have chosen six of your twelve competences to assess during the interview. All six will be used to explore your professional practice application in more detail. A subset of four of these competences will be used to explore your wider technical knowledge where necessary.
You can expect that any competences that did not score a maximum of two marks in the written assessment will be selected for interview questions. That is because, at 22 marks for professional practice, the pass mark for interview is higher than for the written assessment.
Unfortunately, the APM Does not advise you which of the twelve competences have been selected for interview and so you will have to prepare for possible questions on all of them.
Preparing for Chartered Project Professional interview should be approached as two related elements (and only one of these will be needed for the Technical Knowledge Pathway).
Professional Practice
Firstly, ensure that you remain familiar with the content of your application. You are permitted to take a copy of your application into the interview with you, but you are not permitted to read out loud from it. In fairness, it is not going to look very credible if you did.
You will have selected a number of specific competence indicators to include when preparing your written application and these should be the focus of your preparation for the interview questions. The assessors will be aiming to validate the evidence they found in your application.
Consider what you will say if asked to explain each indicator in detail. An easy way to predict a possible question is to add the words “Tell me how you” to the start of any of the professional practice indicators. This will universally turn any indicator into a question.
Treat this question as your starting point and consider what else you might want to tell them to demonstrate your experience and competence.
Technical Knowledge
Secondly, if you applied under the Experiential Pathway, you should prepare for wider technical knowledge questions on each competence which will also form part of your assessment.
Here, the interviewers will assess the breadth (not depth) of your knowledge in each area using the technical knowledge indicators as a framework.
The Technical Knowledge indicators describe the broad knowledge that a Chartered Project Professional would be expected to possess and each of the competences covers a range of complementary areas. Our advice is to carefully read each indicator and to ask yourself two questions: What could the interviewer ask me about this competence? And, how would I answer them?
You will quickly notice that, in the main, each indicator is expecting your knowledge to cover one of two things – either to explain why this topic matters or to explain different ways of approaching it. Once you have determined the likely ‘type’ of question then you can get to work on identifying the points (plural) that you would make in your answer.
This could either comprise of a list of reasons, benefits or advantages to explain why this topic matters. Alternately a list of techniques, methods or models to explain different ways of approaching it.
You are allowed to take brief notes with you into the interview but be aware that you may find that you don’t have time to refer to them. Researching these notes will be your best preparation for the interview.
In order to be successful you are required to achieve a score of 7 from a possible 8 marks. Two marks for each competence. Like Professional Practice, Technical Knowledge competences require evidence of four indicators require evidence of four indicators to gain full (2) marks for each competence.
Ethics, Compliance and Professionalism
The final segment of the Chartered Project Professional interview involves questions on Ethics or, to give it its full title Ethics, Compliance and Professionalism. This is also assessed and you are required to meet the standard in relation to this element too.
In order to prepare for this final part of the interview, it is advisable to read the APM Code of Professional Conduct and also to review the Ethics, Compliance and Professionalism competence indicators that are contained in Appendix 3 of the ChPP Guidance.
We would advise that you reflect both on what ethics means to you and consider examples of occasions when you have behaved in an ethical and professional way.
Here you will be asked up to three questions:
- Firstly, you will be asked to explain what you would consider ethical behaviour to be.
- Secondly, you will be asked to provide up to two examples of ethical or professional behaviour relating to one of the competence criteria provided by the assessor.
Preparing for the interview is not a trivial task and we would, again, emphasise the need to allow yourself at least three weeks for this. In fact, the best time to start preparing will be as soon as you have submitted your written application.
As you gather your thoughts and consider your how you would aim to answer each potential question, it is good practice to make careful notes. Over time, try to reduce these notes to a list of prompts that you can easily learn and remember.
If you have made it this far through the process and been invited to interview, your goal of attaining ChPP status is clearly in sight. So, make a plan, get to work and become a Chartered Project Professional. Good luck!
Changescope. The project leadership people.
We have helped many people through this process before. Why not contact us to learn more about how to plan, structure, draft and submit your ChPP application. enquiries@changescope.com
Leave a Reply