Do you need a training contract before the SQE?

Somewhere in every SQE forum thread, someone asks whether they need to land a training contract before they can qualify. The short answer is no, they don't, and haven't needed to since the SQE route opened up qualification. The longer answer is more useful, because "you don't need one" leaves out how the alternative actually works.

The old assumption still lingers

Under the old Legal Practice Course system, a training contract was the only door through to qualification: two years at a firm, structured seats, a training principal signing you off at the end. That system is gone for anyone qualifying through the SQE, but the language and the anxiety around it haven't caught up. Plenty of capable candidates still assume that without a training contract offer, their route to qualification has stalled. It hasn't. It's just different.

The SQE route replaced the training contract with something broader: qualifying work experience, or QWE. It's regulatory logistics rather than an assessment topic, so it's worth understanding properly rather than picking it up secondhand from a forum thread.

What qualifying work experience actually is

QWE is the SRA's term for the practical experience component of qualification. According to the SRA's own guidance, you need two years' full-time experience (or the part-time equivalent), and it can be built up across up to four different organisations, in paid or voluntary roles.

Two features make it fundamentally different from the training contract model:

• It doesn't have to be one continuous placement. You can piece it together from several roles, in different organisations, over however long it actually takes you.
• It doesn't have to be a formal training role at all. What matters is the nature of the work, not the label on your contract.

To count, the work has to involve providing real legal services, not simulated exercises, and it needs to expose you to at least two of the competencies in the SRA's Statement of Solicitor Competence. Within that, the SRA is genuinely broad about where the experience can come from: paralegal roles, in-house legal teams, law clinics run by universities, charities and pro bono organisations, and yes, traditional training contracts too, if you get one. A training contract is one way to accumulate QWE. It is not the only way, and increasingly it isn't even the most common way for SQE candidates.

How sign-off works

QWE has to be confirmed, not just claimed. The SRA requires confirmation from a solicitor of England and Wales, or a Compliance Officer for Legal Practice (COLP), who has reviewed your work during that period and received feedback from whoever supervised you day to day. Usefully, that confirming solicitor doesn't need to work at the same organisation as you, and doesn't need to hold a current practising certificate. If you did a placement without a formal supervising solicitor on-site, you may still be able to get it confirmed by a solicitor elsewhere who reviewed your work properly, provided the substance of the confirmation is genuine.

You don't need to register each block of QWE as you go. Registration happens when you apply for admission as a solicitor, at which point you pull together the confirmations covering your full two years. That said, keeping a rolling log of what you did, which competencies it touched, and who could confirm it will save you a scramble later, especially if any of the organisations involved has since closed, restructured, or lost touch with the person who supervised you.

Sequencing: before, during, or after the exams

One of the more freeing parts of the SQE system is that QWE and the assessments don't have to happen in any fixed order. You can complete QWE before you sit SQE1 and SQE2, sandwich it between the two, do it after you've passed both, or spread it across the entire period. The SRA will also let you count experience gained in the past, with no time limit on how far back it goes, as long as it meets the criteria.

That flexibility creates real choices worth thinking through rather than defaulting into:

• QWE first, exams later suits people who fall into paralegal or clinic work early and want the exams to follow naturally once they understand the profession better, though it can mean a longer runway to qualification.
• Exams first, QWE after suits people who want to prove the technical knowledge is there before committing years to a particular employer or sector, and it can strengthen your position when you do go looking for QWE roles.
• Running them in parallel is the most common pattern in practice: working in a paralegal or similar role while studying for SQE1 and SQE2 around it, so the two years of experience and the exam preparation overlap rather than queue up one after the other.

None of these is the "correct" order. The right sequence depends on your finances, whether you already have a foot in a legal employer, and how you personally handle studying while working versus studying with a clearer head and no day job competing for your attention.

How firms are treating SQE-route candidates in 2026

Recruitment for SQE-qualifying roles has matured a lot since the early transition years, when firms were still working out how to badge these positions. Most larger firms that still run structured "training contract" style programmes now run them as SQE-aligned schemes, often building the qualifying assessments into the programme and offering it as a packaged route. Alongside that, though, there's now a much larger and more visible market of standalone paralegal and QWE-eligible roles, some explicitly marketed as such, precisely because firms have realised that candidates piecing together their own QWE are a normal, not unusual, part of the qualification pipeline.

If you're applying for paralegal or similar roles with an eye on QWE, it's worth asking early, before you accept, whether the organisation is used to confirming QWE and who would realistically sign it off. Most legitimate legal employers will have done this before by now, but it's a fair question to ask rather than assume.

The trade-offs, honestly

A structured training contract still has real advantages: a guaranteed two years in one place, an institution used to supervising and confirming QWE without you having to chase it, and often a clearer path into a permanent role at the end. If one is offered to you on reasonable terms, there's no need to turn it down out of some sense that the "true" SQE path avoids them.

Assembling your own QWE has different trade-offs. It gives you more control over sequencing and lets you diversify your experience across different practice areas or organisation types, which can be genuinely useful if you're not yet sure what kind of law you want to practise. Against that, it puts more of the administrative burden on you: tracking competencies, chasing confirmations, and managing the uncertainty of stitching together roles rather than having one employer own the whole two years. Neither path is more legitimate than the other in the SRA's eyes. They're simply different shapes of the same requirement.

If you want to talk through how other candidates are sequencing their QWE against their exam prep, that's a recurring topic in PasSQE's lounge, where people share what's actually worked for them rather than the theory.

The takeaway

You do not need a training contract to qualify through the SQE. You need two years of qualifying work experience, confirmed by a solicitor or COLP, gained across up to four organisations, in whatever order suits your circumstances. A training contract is one legitimate way to get there; paralegal work, clinics, and voluntary legal roles are others. Read the SRA's QWE guidance directly before you make any decisions, and choose your sequencing based on your own finances and opportunities rather than an assumption about what the "proper" route is supposed to look like.