What QWE is
Qualifying work experience is the practical half of the SQE route: two years, full-time or the part-time equivalent, of experience providing legal services, alongside passing SQE1 and SQE2and satisfying the SRA’s character and suitability requirements.
It can be gathered in up to four organisations, in a single block or in stages, and it does not have to be a training contract. Six months in a law clinic and eighteen months as a paralegal, added together, meet the requirement as squarely as two years at one firm.
What counts
The test is not the job title. It is whether you were providing legal services in a way that gave you the opportunity to develop the competences in the Statement of Solicitor Competence — with exposure to at least two of them, and professionalism and ethics running through all of it.
- Commonly qualifying: paralegal work, a training contract, a placement or vacation scheme of sufficient length, in-house legal work, work at a law centre or advice agency, and a student law clinic.
- Paid or unpaid both count, and so does part-time work pro-rated.
- Before, during or after the assessments — the order is yours.
- What will not do: work with no exposure to legal services at all, or experience nobody eligible is willing to confirm.
Who confirms it
Each period is confirmed by a solicitor of England and Wales or by a firm’s compliance officer for legal practice. They confirm how long the experience lasted and that you had the opportunity to develop the relevant competences. They need either direct experience of your work, or to have reviewed it and taken feedback from the people who supervised you.
The practical risk is obvious and it bites years later: the person who could confirm your first placement has left, and nobody remaining knows your work. Get each period confirmed when it ends, not when you apply to be admitted.
Recording it as you go
Keep a contemporaneous record for every placement. It costs ten minutes a month and it saves a scramble:
- Organisation, role, exact start and end dates, and hours if part-time.
- The name and contact details of the person who will confirm it, kept up to date.
- What you actually did, mapped to the competences — the matters you worked on, the documents you drafted, the clients you dealt with.
- Anything demonstrating professionalism and ethics in practice, which is examined in both stages.
This record is also the raw material for interviews and applications, and for the skills assessed in SQE2 — it is not wasted administration.
When to do it
Most candidates overlap it with preparation, working as a paralegal while revising for SQE1. That is demanding — the honest version of the week is in preparing while working full-time — but it means the two years and the assessments run in parallel rather than end to end.
It also makes the exams easier. Procedure learned at a desk is abstract; procedure you have followed on a real matter is not, and both stages of the SQE are written for the solicitor you are becoming rather than the student you were. The rules governing all of this are the SRA’s own, and its guidance for candidates is the version that governs.