Tranferrable skills
The skills I will be using to prepare and write your proposals and other documents I have been practising at an enhanced level during my 30-year career in national newspaper journalism.
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You can be sure I will:
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Meet your deadline, having consistently filed reports from the world’s biggest football matches the moment they have ended… even when they hinged on the final penalty.
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Be effective in subject matter expert interviews, when – with the right mentality and preparation – I wrote up the four articles from Sir Andy Murray, above, on the back of an interview that lasted 4min 48secs.
Capture the tone of your company after ghost-writing hundreds of articles and columns for such disparate characters as Sir Henry Cooper and Denise Van Outen, Dickie Bird, Sir Geoff Hurst, Declan Donnelly, and dozens more.
Unravel and explain complicated, technical material, when the cornerstone of my writing was often to dissect, interpret, and lead newspaper readers through complicated issues. Translating 117 pages of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play guidelines into “six crisp paragraphs” within an hour of the document being published was a particular highlight!
Produce compelling writing, when my writing has always needed to be enticing enough just to lure a reader in the first place before I could start to win them over. “You have flair and give readers the information they require but with a good touch in the writing so they know they will read your articles again”, was a comment in a recent appraisal.
Learning best practice
Nobody ever said, “When I grow up, I want to be a bid writer”!
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By the same token, when I spoke at The Big One 2024 in Birmingham , the UK annual conference of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals, I asked, “Who wanted to go into bid writing and who just ‘sort of stumbled into it’?”
There was an embarrased consenting mumble for the latter.
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Having specifically targeted the profession as a channel for my talents – albeit as a second career – I have been determined to do things by the book.
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APMP
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As the professional body for the discipline, I felt in important to study for their Foundation Certificate as quickly as possible:
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APMP devised the course to:
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Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of best practice for proposal and bid management
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Demonstrate commitment to professional development in the industry
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Prepare for additional responsibility and more complex assignments
In addition, I took specialist APMP micro-certificates in Bid and Proposal Writing and Executive Summaries.
Shipley Ltd
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Early in my career, I was fortunate Shipley onboarded me as an Associate, furthering my training in the Shipley method while I undertook assignments on their behalf.
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Practitioners around the world describe their customer-centric structure and strategic approach as the “gold standard” of proposal management and I draw on those principles in all other areas of my work.