You have booked your SQE1 sitting, you are chipping away at FLK1 and FLK2, and then a friend asks a question that stops you cold: "Where are you doing your two years of work experience?" Suddenly you realise the exams are only half the story. To qualify as a solicitor in England and Wales you also need Qualifying Work Experience — QWE for short — and a surprising number of candidates leave it far too late, or log it in a way that later gets questioned.
Let me walk you through what actually counts, who can confirm it, and the habits that keep your record clean. Get this right early and it becomes a quiet background task rather than a last-minute panic.
What is QWE and how does it fit with SQE1 and SQE2?
Under the current SRA framework there are four things you must complete to qualify: pass SQE1, pass SQE2, meet the character and suitability requirements, and complete a minimum of two years' full-time (or equivalent) qualifying work experience. QWE sits alongside the exams, not after them. You can do it before you pass SQE1, during your study for SQE2, or spread across both — the order is flexible, which is one of the biggest differences from the old training contract system.
The point of QWE is not to test you again. It is to give you real exposure to the practical work of a solicitor, so that the skills examined in SQE2 — client interviewing, advocacy, case and matter analysis, legal research and legal writing — sit on top of genuine experience. Think of the exams as proof of competence, and QWE as the proof of practice.
What actually counts as Qualifying Work Experience?
This is where most candidates relax too soon, or panic too early. The SRA definition is genuinely broad. QWE is experience of providing legal services that gives you the chance to develop some of the competences needed to practise as a solicitor. The key features are:
- A total of at least two years full-time or equivalent (part-time work is fine, you just accumulate the time).
- It can be gained at up to four different organisations. You do not need a single employer for the whole period.
- It can be paid or unpaid, in England and Wales or abroad, provided it involves legal services.
- It must give you exposure to legal work — not just administrative or purely commercial tasks.
So what does that look like in real life? A paralegal role in a firm counts. A placement in a law clinic or pro bono unit counts. Time in an in-house legal team counts. A student law society advice project, supervised properly, can count. Even a role in a Citizens Advice setting can count if it involves providing legal services under appropriate supervision. The label on the door matters far less than the substance of the work.
Ask yourself one honest question about any role: "Did I provide legal services and develop a competence a solicitor needs?" If the answer is yes, it is very likely QWE. If you were only photocopying and making coffee, it is not.
What does NOT count?
Purely clerical work with no legal element does not count. Neither does experience where nobody suitable can confirm it. And crucially, QWE is about developing competences — you do not have to cover every practice area, and you do not need to touch all thirteen FLK subjects at work. Nobody expects your day job to include Trusts Law, Land Law and Solicitor Accounts all at once. The exams test breadth; QWE tests practical grounding.
Who confirms your QWE — and why the confirmer matters
Your experience has to be confirmed by either a solicitor or by your organisation's Compliance Officer for Legal Practice (COLP). The confirming solicitor does not have to be your direct supervisor, but they must have a proper basis to confirm the work — usually because they supervised you, or because arrangements are in place for them to be satisfied about what you did.
Two things the confirmer signs off on: that you had the opportunity to develop the prescribed competences, and that there are no character or suitability issues they are aware of. That second point is easy to overlook. Keep your professional conduct clean throughout — the same standards that Legal Services examines for FLK1 apply to your working life.
Here is a practical trap. If you work somewhere with no solicitor and no COLP — say a small advice charity — you may need to arrange for an external solicitor to supervise or confirm the work. Sort this out at the start of a placement, not the end. Chasing a confirmation two years later, from someone who has since left, is a genuine headache I have watched candidates struggle with.
How to log your QWE properly (the part people get wrong)
Logging is not a form you fill in at the finish line. Treat it as an ongoing diary. The SRA does not prescribe one rigid template, but you will eventually record your QWE through your mySRA account, and your confirmer will need to verify it. What you write should stand up to scrutiny.
A workable habit is to keep a running log with, for each block of experience:
- The organisation name and your role.
- Start and end dates, and whether full-time or part-time (with hours).
- The competences you developed — map them to the SRA Statement of Solicitor Competence (A: ethics and judgement, B: technical legal practice, C: working with others, D: managing yourself and your work).
- A few concrete examples: "drafted particulars of claim under supervision", "attended a client interview and produced the attendance note", "carried out legal research on a limitation point".
- The name of the solicitor or COLP who will confirm it.
Update your log every fortnight while the detail is fresh. Memory fades fast, and "I did something with a contract dispute back in spring" is not a confirmable record.
Why bother mapping to competences? Because it doubles as SQE2 preparation. When you note that you drafted a letter of advice or structured an oral submission, you are rehearsing exactly the skills the SQE2 assessment marks. Candidates who log with the competences in mind tend to walk into their client interviewing and legal writing tasks with real muscle memory rather than theory.
A simple timeline: sequencing QWE around the exams
There is no single correct order, but here is a pattern that works for a lot of people. Start accumulating QWE as soon as you can — even a paralegal role while you revise FLK1 and FLK2 counts, and it makes the abstract law feel concrete. Sit SQE1 when your knowledge is exam-ready. Keep working, keep logging. Then prepare for SQE2 once you have some genuine practice under your belt, because the five skills land far more naturally when you have done the real thing.
Two years of full-time equivalent is the floor, not a target to pad out. If you work part-time at 50%, expect roughly four calendar years. Plan your finances and your study around that reality rather than assuming everything finishes neatly at 24 months.
One more thing worth saying plainly: do not wait until you have "enough" experience to start recording it. Every week you leave unlogged is a week you may struggle to reconstruct later. The candidates who find QWE stressful are almost always the ones who treated it as an afterthought.
How CELE SQE can help
QWE is your responsibility to arrange, but the exams either side of it are where we come in. Our SQE1 courses run from £1,750 for the Short-term Course up to £3,720 for the Long-term Course, with a single-FLK option at half price if you only need FLK1 or FLK2, plus a £150 early-bird discount. For the practical side, our SQE2 Course is £1,450 and includes 61 full mock questions built 1:1 to the official SRA format — the same skills you have been quietly developing in your QWE. Come and say hello on WeChat SQE100, email [email protected], or browse celebar.com whenever you want a steer.