Depressing comment from Emily, a participant on today’s course for proposal staff drawn from across Australia: “On my first proposal, I cried every night”. Interesting how many people start work on proposals by being thrown in at the deep end, with no prior experience and no training. And yet Emily’s first proposal would have won or lost her company a potentially important piece of business.

I’m glad airlines don’t take the same approach. I can just imagine flying home on Saturday and hearing the greeting, “Hello from the flight deck, Sam here. A group of us were standing round at the airport in uniform, and they picked me out to fly the plane tonight. Not done it before, so fasten your seatbelts tight, and here’s hoping that I can work out what all of these levers are for.”

I so love getting companies to realise that developing a proposal isn’t a trivial task to be passed over to whomever happens to be at a loose end that day – or to be undertaken with no training whatsoever.