Becoming Chartered

Becoming chartered means representing the planning practice to the highest standards and demonstrating our competence when undertaking work in the industry. And we’re proud to - as chartered professionals - remain at the forefront of new developments, legislative changes and the latest planning knowledge as part of our continuous professional development.

Over the past year we were able to undertake a broad range of projects and gain a breadth of experience, which helped us to meet all of the competencies that are assessed in the APC. Gaining the required level of experience during pandemic restrictions was somewhat a concern, but our Managers helped us get the relevant experience by identifying project work which would ensure we would meet the required competencies. The competencies included topics such as ethics, politics and economics.

To assist us with the process, early on we were each allocated an APC Mentor, being a colleague that had recently passed their APC. They helped to guide us through the process and kept us on track. In addition, a number of other members of the Planning Team are chartered which meant it was always easy to ask for help from more than one source.

As part of the graduate scheme at Deloitte, we were permitted five days of study leave, which were vital in ensuring that we had time to concentrate on our submission. We were allowed to use them on days which suited us best which ensured that we could fit our workload for the week around our submission.

We are now looking forward to the next chapter of our careers and continuing our professional development as Chartered Town Planners. We each have different specialties, such as heritage and regeneration, which we have developed over the past two years and we are looking forward to developing these further. We are also looking forward to being APC Mentors to the new graduates, which will give us an opportunity to pass on our experience of becoming chartered!

Overall, we are both delighted to now be Chartered Town Planners and thankful to our mentors at Deloitte for all of their help with the process. Below, we have listed our top tips for anybody working towards chartership:

• Make use of the RTPI resources, especially the timeline of when to start and finish each element of the submission;
• Find yourself a mentor who is recently chartered;
• Plan ahead to make sure the projects you are working on provide suitable experience to hit all of the competencies that the APC is assessed against;
• Focus on how you contributed to completing work or solving problems in planning; and
• Start your reflective journal early and set aside time each week to keep it up to date, if left too late it can take a lot of work to get it back up to date!