At the first attempt!!!
Honestly, when was your last time taking an exam? We told our kids to study and do exams. We ourselves forgot how to do exams.
Like it or not, if you are going through New Engineering Contract (NEC) Project Manager or Supervisor Accreditation, at the very last stage you will need to get through a rather challenging assessment.
Depending on the region you are in, the assessment format differs. If you are in Hong Kong, in the final assessment you will need to get through some short-answer questions (the main challenge) and a set of multiple choice questions (relatively easy). If you are in any parts of the world, you will need to get through a set of rather tough multiple choice questions within a relatively short time limit.
I understand most of the things taught during training, but how can I retain the information in my brain?
The key is not to depend totally on your memories. It is an open-book assessment, and you can refer to as much information as you want during the assessment. Even during real life practice as a contract advisor, I seldom memorise every single clause and linkages within the contract.
NEC has already laid out a handy index section at the back of the contract. Then you do three things:
- Translate your situation into some contractually meaningful key words;
- Look at the key words in the index section;
- Look up all the related contract clauses as pointed to you by the index section.
The most challenging step is the first step. If you keep looking for terms like variation orders, extension of time, preliminaries etc., you will never find them. The reason is these terms are never used in NEC.
That is the main reason why you need to attend a training course. The course is to equip you to ring your bell and formulate some keywords when confronted by a real life situation.
Follow the above, statistics showed most of the delegates in the accreditation course pass.
With flying colours.
