Tips for completing your application

1. Respond to the question

Each of the questions we ask in our forms is designed to prompt you to provide specific information about you, your role, your organisation and how the services we offer can benefit. By answering each directly, you can help us to understand where you are and what you need. 

2. Give examples

It is always helpful to know a little bit about you and your role or where your organisation is in terms of its governance. While we can infer some of this from job titles or our knowledge of the different bodies in the sector, we'd also like to hear it from you.

Help us to understand the practical impact our services will have by giving examples of how they will:

• help you progress from where you currently are to where you would like to get
• help you tackle particular issues that are important to you and/or your organisation
• offer concrete learnings for you to apply in your role
• contribute to your individual or organisational development

Even if you are new to governance and maybe don't know what you don't know, you can tell us the sort of practices you would like to try and move away from, or simply let us know where you think you are in terms of your understanding of governance. Be honest - we're here to help.

3. Tailor your responses

We know that it can be tempting, especially when submitting multiple applications for the Certificate modules, for example, to copy and paste your responses. Please try to avoid this where you can. Each of the modules (or different training courses) address different topics and different areas of governance. Check what the individual service being applied for means in the context of you or your organisation and explain to us the impact you expect it to have.

4. Match your answer to the criteria & scoring scheme

For each of the application processes that we run, we have provided scoring criteria, including what we are looking for in responses and how scores are allocated. Take a look at the milestones within the scoring scheme and try to build your submission around what is being sought. Don't worry if you can't do it exactly (we know that everyone's circumstances and starting points are different). Treat the scoring criteria as a guide to help you provide the fullest answers that you can.

5. Use the word allocation

Please understand that in making our services available to the SGA community, we are responsible for spending public money. We take this very seriously and look to achieve the best impact that we can with those funds. To do this effectively, we need a certain amount of information. We don't ask for masses of detail; just enough to help us understand the benefit that we can provide to you or your organisation. It's difficult to do this on the strength of a single sentence!

Of course, if you have fully answered the question concisely and efficiently, we won't be looking for you to fill out the word count just for the sake of it. However, if you do feel that certain answers are a bit too concise, we encourage you to check your other answers for anything that might be more relevant to the question at hand.

We simply want to give you the ability to make as strong a case as possible for your application.

Thank you for taking the time to read these tips and to submit your application. We wish you the best of luck.