Qualifying Work Experience (QWE): What Counts and How to Record It

You can ace both halves of SQE1, sail through SQE2, and still not be a solicitor. That trips people up more often than you'd think. The exams are only part of the deal — alongside them sits two years of Qualifying Work Experience, and getting the QWE wrong (or recording it sloppily) can stall your admission long after the hard revision is done.

So let's be precise about what QWE actually is, what the SRA will and won't accept, who can sign it off, and how to keep a record that survives scrutiny. This is the bit candidates leave to the last minute. Don't be that candidate.

What Qualifying Work Experience actually is

QWE is one of the four pillars of qualification under the SQE route. To be admitted as a solicitor in England & Wales you need: a degree (or equivalent qualification or experience), a pass in both SQE1 and SQE2, two years' worth of full-time QWE, and a clean pass through the SRA's character and suitability assessment. Miss any one and you don't qualify. Simple as that.

The headline definition is broad on purpose. QWE is experience of providing legal services that gives you the opportunity to develop some of the competences a day-one solicitor needs. The SRA deliberately moved away from the old training-contract straitjacket. You no longer need a single training contract at a single firm doing four neat "seats". You can build your two years across up to four different organisations, and the work can have happened before, during or after your exams.

The "two years full-time" figure means full-time equivalent. Part-time work counts pro rata — work three days a week and it simply takes you longer to accumulate the two years. There's no requirement to do it all in one continuous block, and no expiry on QWE you completed in the past, provided it genuinely meets the criteria.

The competences it's meant to develop

QWE isn't about ticking off a checklist of practice areas. It's about exposure to the kind of work that lets you build the SRA's competences — things like working with clients, applying legal knowledge to real problems, managing matters, and behaving ethically and professionally. You do not need to touch all of them in every placement. Across the whole two years, taken together, your experience should give you the chance to develop the competences relevant to being a solicitor.

That word — opportunity — matters. The SRA looks for whether the role gave you the chance to develop competences, not whether you became flawless at all of them. Nobody is auditing your performance in QWE the way SQE2 audits your skills.

What counts — and the things people get wrong

Here's where the questions pile up. The framework is generous, but "generous" doesn't mean "anything goes". Let me set out the spread.

Experience that typically counts:

• Work in a law firm — paralegal roles, the traditional training contract, placements, even reception-to-fee-earning routes if the work involves providing legal services.
• Time in a law clinic, including a university law clinic or pro bono outfit, where you advise on real matters under supervision.
• Work in a Citizens Advice setting or other advice agency, where you're giving legal help to actual people with actual problems.
• In-house legal teams — a company's or charity's legal department, local government legal services, or a regulator.
• Volunteering and placements, paid or unpaid, provided the work is genuine legal-services work and is properly supervised and confirmed.

What generally does not count:

• Purely administrative work with no legal-services element. Filing, scanning and diary-management on their own won't get you there.
• Academic study. Your law degree, a conversion course or the SQE revision itself is not QWE — it's a separate qualification requirement.
• Work where nobody appropriate is willing or able to confirm it. If you can't get sign-off, it can't count, however good the experience was.
• Roles where you never actually provide legal services to clients — a marketing job at a law firm, say.

The most common QWE mistake isn't doing the wrong work. It's doing the right work and never getting it confirmed — then discovering, two years on, that the supervising solicitor has left and nobody will sign.

Paralegal work: yes, but mind the confirmation

Paralegal experience is one of the most common QWE building blocks, and it absolutely counts. The catch is confirmation. You need someone who can vouch that the work happened and that it gave you the chance to develop the relevant competences. Plan for that on day one of the job, not on the day you submit your admission application.

Pre-exam experience counts

A lot of candidates assume QWE has to come after they've passed SQE1. It doesn't. The paralegal year you did before you ever booked an exam can count, as long as it meets the criteria and you can have it confirmed. Sequencing is flexible — though there's a real argument for letting some real-world exposure run alongside your SQE exam preparation, because seeing how a Business Law and Practice point or a Dispute Resolution deadline plays out in practice makes the FLK1 and FLK2 material stick far better than rote revision ever will.

Who can confirm your QWE

This is the part with actual rules, so read carefully. Your QWE has to be confirmed by one of two types of person:

1. A solicitor — typically the solicitor you worked with or under, who can confirm what you did and that it gave you the opportunity to develop competences; or
2. A Compliance Officer for Legal Practice (COLP) at the organisation, who can confirm the experience even where the day-to-day supervisor wasn't themselves a solicitor.

The confirming solicitor doesn't have to have supervised your every task, but they do need to be satisfied the experience is genuine and meets the criteria. They're putting their name to it, so they'll want to be comfortable with what they're signing.

Two things candidates routinely overlook. First, the confirmer should hold a current practising certificate — get a confirmation from someone who's since let theirs lapse and you may have a problem. Second, if no one at the organisation is willing or able to confirm, the experience cannot be used. That's why a law clinic or advice agency with a named supervising solicitor is gold: the confirmation route is built in.

How to record QWE properly

Recording QWE is two separate things, and people conflate them. There's your contemporaneous record (what you keep as you go), and there's the formal confirmation and registration with the SRA when the time comes. Get the first one right and the second one becomes painless.

Keep a contemporaneous log

Don't trust your memory two years out. Start a simple running log from your very first day in any legal role. Capture, for each placement:

• The organisation, your job title, and exact start and end dates.
• Whether the role was full-time or part-time (and your hours, so you can work out the full-time equivalent).
• The name and SRA number of the solicitor or COLP who will confirm it.
• A short note, updated periodically, of the kinds of work you did and which competences it touched.

A spreadsheet is fine. The point is that when you sit down to formalise everything, you're transcribing facts, not reconstructing history from half-remembered matters and a dead email account.

Register it with the SRA

When your experience is confirmed, you record it through your SRA account (the mySRA system). You'll need the details above plus the confirmer's information. The mechanics do change from time to time, so rather than trust anything you half-remember, check the current process and any required template on sqe.sra.org.uk before you submit. The SRA publishes a QWE template and guidance specifically for this — use the live version.

A worked example

Take Priya. After her law degree she spends 14 months as a full-time paralegal in a high-street firm's conveyancing and probate teams. She then moves in-house to a logistics company's small legal team for 10 months, part-time at three days a week, while she revises for and sits SQE1. Finally she does a six-month stint, full-time, in a university-affiliated law clinic supervised by a practising solicitor.

How does that stack up? The 14 months full-time counts in full. The in-house stint at 0.6 of full-time over 10 months gives her roughly six months' full-time equivalent. The clinic adds another six months full-time. Added together she's at around two years and a couple of months of full-time-equivalent QWE — comfortably over the line — spread across three organisations, which is within the four-organisation limit. Each placement has a named confirmer she lined up early. Crucially, none of it was wasted, because she logged dates and hours as she went and didn't have to scramble.

The lesson from Priya isn't the arithmetic. It's that she treated confirmation as a precondition of each role, not an afterthought.

Where QWE meets the exams — and your prep

QWE and the SQE assessments are separate requirements, but they talk to each other, and treating them as totally siloed is a missed trick. The 13 functioning legal knowledge subjects across SQE1 — Business Law and Practice, Dispute Resolution, Contract, Tort and the rest in FLK1; Property Practice, Wills and the Administration of Estates, Solicitors Accounts, Land Law, Trusts and Criminal Law and Practice in FLK2 — read very differently once you've watched them play out on a real file. Solicitors Accounts in particular goes from baffling to obvious the moment you've seen a client account in the wild.

That said, don't kid yourself that QWE will carry your exam performance. It won't. SQE pass rates are sobering, and the published SRA reports show the first FLK1 and FLK2 sittings are where a lot of people come unstuck — check the latest figures on the SRA's site rather than any number you've seen floating around, because they're updated each cycle. The candidates who pass first time tend to be the ones who drilled single-best-answer technique relentlessly, not just the ones with the most impressive paralegal CV.

That's where focused practice earns its keep. Working through a large, well-tagged question bank — the Ant Law SQE Question Bank carries 14,000+ single-best-answer MCQs mapped to the FLK1 and FLK2 syllabus — lets you turn the patchy, real-world knowledge you pick up in QWE into the exam-shaped recall the SRA actually tests. Pair your day job with timed practice and the two reinforce each other nicely.

A quick QWE sanity check

Before you bank on any role counting, run it past these questions:

• Does the work involve providing legal services, not just admin around them?
• Does it give me the chance to develop some of the day-one solicitor competences?
• Is there a solicitor or COLP who can and will confirm it?
• Am I recording dates, hours and tasks now, rather than trusting my memory later?
• Across all my placements, am I within the four-organisation limit and heading towards two years full-time equivalent?

Five yeses and you're in good shape. Any no, and that's the thing to fix.

Character, suitability and the final furlong

One last piece people forget until it's looming: the SRA's character and suitability assessment. This runs separately from QWE but it's part of the same admission decision, and it covers things like criminal matters, financial conduct and honesty. The framework is principle-based and the SRA assesses disclosures case by case, so if you have anything you're unsure about, raise it early rather than at the very end. The procedural detail lives on sra.org.uk — read it directly and, if in doubt, ask them.

Think of qualification as four locks that all have to open: your degree or equivalent, both SQE assessments passed, two years of properly confirmed QWE, and character and suitability cleared. QWE is the one most within your control to get wrong through sheer admin drift. Treat it with the same seriousness you give the exams and it becomes the easy lock, not the one that jams.

So here's your concrete next step. Open a QWE log today — even if your first legal role is months away — and write down, for any past experience, who could confirm it and whether you still have their details. Then get your exam technique match-fit alongside it: head to antlaw.ai and put yourself through some timed FLK1 and FLK2 practice on the Ant Law SQE Question Bank, so that when your QWE is signed off, your exams aren't the thing holding up your admission. Questions on any of it? The team's at [email protected], and the authoritative position is always on sqe.sra.org.uk.