Here's what you need to know about the Chevening work experience requirement before you hit submit on your Chevening Application.
If you are applying for Chevening, you will have seen that you need at least 2 years of work experience under your belt in order to be eligible. Year on year, this eligibility criterion is the source of many questions from our applicants. It leads to many ineligible applications too. In fact, 70% of the ineligible applications we received in 2022 did not meet the two year work experience requirement. Here are our answers to the most common questions we receive on this topic.
It is assumed that applicants in full-time employment work on average 35 hours per week and 40 weeks per year. This equates to 2,800 hours over two years. However, if you have worked over 2,800 hours in less than two years, you will still be eligible. If your work experience is not full-time work, calculate the number of hours worked multiplied by the number of weeks in the role. All applicants must have met the work experience requirement when they submit their application.
This includes full-time employment, part-time employment, voluntary work, paid or unpaid internships, freelancing, and self-employment. Work experience from before, during, or after your undergraduate degree is eligible and can take place in any country, regardless of whether or not it is your country of citizenship. If your work experience was a mandatory part of your university course, this will not count towards the work experience criteria.
We accept work experience from any field. However, if your course choices are not related to your work experience, you will need to explain why you are seeking to make a career change. Note the transferable skills you have gained from your current field of work and how they will help you in your studies and with your future career goals.
We do not require physical proof of your work experience (for example, payslips, a certificate, a letter from your company) or any other type of documentation. However, if your application is progressed to interview stage, you will be asked a series of questions about your work experience. Therefore, you will need to be able to expand on the employment information that you provided in the application form.
You can find out more about the work experience requirement in on our work experience page and in our FAQs.
We held two Q&A sessions on our Instagram and Facebook channels last week to answer your questions about the Chevening Application process. As we were not able to answer every question in the time that we had (we received over 500!), here is our summary of the most common questions that came up, and our answers to them.
Chevening Scholar Rafael Zhansultanov from Kazakhstan shares the insights and experiences he gathered from applying to Chevening four times before successfully embarking on his Chevening year at the London School of Economics.
If you weren’t selected for the 2023-24 Chevening cohort, you may be wondering where you went wrong. Here is the top feedback our reading committees had about this year’s applicants.