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  • Do you have a personal brand for tender writing?
    • All freelance tender writers, no matter how closely affiliated they are with a company, know that it’s important to forge and maintain a personal brand for their industry. Having an established brand helps you to generate tender writing business in a number of ways, including making your work synonymous with a name which is trusted and

  • Flexible tender writing practices
    • When we work as freelancers in tender writing, it can often be difficult to step from one methodology to another. Each person whom we align ourselves with will have a different way of approaching each bid, meaning it’s sometimes difficult to remember exactly what each customer is looking for when they sign you up to

  • Are tender writing opportunities deliberately obstructive?
    • As a tender writer, have you ever had the feeling that the company you are developing a bid to is being deliberately obstructive? By this, I mean the sense that a firm are putting needless and unnecessary obstacles in the way in order to deliberately occlude your company from managing to develop a bid compliantly.

  • Upping your competitiveness in tender writing
    • Have you ever thought of the words which we use when we talk about the world of bids and tenders? ‘Qualifying’. ‘Winning’. ‘Success’. ‘Preferred suppliers’. All of these words demonstrate a simple tenet about our profession – it’s all about competitiveness. This sense of competition is the adrenalin-fuelled boost that keeps us working long in

  • Staying focused on tender writing
    • If you sometimes lack focus when you are faced with a large tender writing task, follow these simple tips to regain your sense of purpose and keep you on track for winning… Have a firm routine Understanding yourself and the way you work most productively can be invaluable when you are taking on large projects which could sidetrack

Professional development in tender writing

calendar 300x225 Professional development in tender writingAnyone who has worked in a corporate organisation for any length of time is familiar with the concept of continued professional development. Normally accompanied by a flexible plan, our professional development strategy details the various activities which we are going to undertake in order to ensure that we remain at the top of our game and further our chances of promotion, or increased responsibility at the company we work for.

Going freelance means that this aspect of our career can often be neglected, as our time is spent on the front line of business, providing consultancy or tender writing services for people and working to tight deadlines to deliver compliant and hopefully winning bid documents. Professional development is usually the last thing on the mind of most bid writing professionals, as the long hours which most of us keep, and the need to support clients at very short notice can mean there is rarely any time to pick up a book and learn more about our chosen industry.

Just as in any other industry, however, things change all the time with the bid writing process. The management of bids, best practice, and recommendations for language use can evolve as rapidly in the world of proposals as it does in the IT sector, marketing industries or any other professional sphere. What was once considered best practice for a proposal may now be seen as archaic and out dated. As technology evolves, the protocol for bid writing changes and develops too, in line with new possibilities for print or submission.

Do you remember the first time you were asked to submit a bid online, rather than printing it off and sending it by courier? Or the strange moment when you realised that your evaluator would rather see your document on a CD than wade through pages of written copy? These are hugely significant leaps forward in the world of bid writing, and unless we attend to trends and shifts and adapt to them, we’ll be left floundering as bid writers, while our competitors achieve more than we are able.

This is why ongoing professional development is as important within the world of bid writing and management as in any other industry. It achieves the following benefits for the savvy bid writer:

  • Reminds us to refresh our skills and gain an ongoing foundation for further development
  • Keeps us informed of changes and trends in the industry which can support our bid writing
  • Enables us to keep ahead of competitors by learning new techniques and best practice for bid submission
  • Keeps our writing sharp, focussed and pertinent.

If your professional development is slipping in favour of ‘front line’ work, it could be time to allocate a few hours each week to reading, research, courses and learning.

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