An experience section is not a project history — it’s an answer to a specific, scored question the RFP already asked. Structure it around the question, not the résumé.
Key takeaways
CCDC 23 frames a tender’s later stages as “evaluation for compliance, selection, award” — an evaluator working through a stated set of criteria, not reading a firm’s history for general impressions. An experience section written to impress rather than to answer those specific criteria is solving a different problem than the one being scored.
The RFP’s own evaluation table — however detailed or sparse — is the structure to write to. If it asks for “three projects of similar scope and value completed in the last five years,” the experience section should present exactly that, in that order, before any older or larger project the firm is more proud of — the same shape CCDC's own Contractor's Qualification Statement asks for, listing key and comparable projects completed in the past five years by name. A chronological project history that happens to include the required examples somewhere in the middle forces an evaluator to do the matching work the proposal should have done for them — work an evaluator reading dozens of submissions on a deadline is not inclined to do generously.
Most RFPs cap the experience section at a fixed page count, which turns space allocation into a scoring decision made before a single sentence is drafted. The worked example below shows the arithmetic: covering fewer than the required number of similar projects caps the achievable score on that criterion no matter how well the covered projects are written, because the evaluator has nothing to award marks against for the missing ones.
An experience section is often drafted by the person who ran the project, which produces prose written the way that person would explain the job to a client — proud of the difficult parts, light on the parts an evaluator actually needs. An evaluator scoring a stack of submissions on a deadline needs the RFP’s own vocabulary reflected back at them: if the criterion says “demonstrated experience managing multi-phase occupied renovations,” the project narrative should use that phrase, or something close to it, rather than making the evaluator infer that a described project happens to qualify.
A project example and a reference are two halves of the same claim — the narrative asserts the work happened as described, and the reference verifies it. Naming a project in the experience section without a live, accurate contact behind it is an invitation for the two sections of the same submission to contradict each other the moment a reviewer picks up the phone, which is a worse outcome than simply choosing a less impressive but fully verifiable project instead.
Similarity is defined by the RFP’s own stated criteria — scope, value band, sector, delivery method — not by how similar the firm itself feels the project is. A $40-million institutional project and a $4-million private renovation may both be “concrete and steel” in a firm’s own telling, but an RFP scoring against a stated value band will not credit the mismatch, whatever the technical overlap. The same discipline applies to procurement route: a project delivered under integrated project delivery does not automatically satisfy a criterion asking for stipulated-price experience, and vice versa, even where the finished building looks identical.
Not every RFP publishes a point-by-point evaluation table — some state only the criteria names, with weighting left unstated or described only in broad terms like “technical merit will be a significant factor.” Where no explicit split is given, the safest default is still to allocate space in proportion to how the criteria are listed and how much explanation the RFP gives each one — a criterion described in three sentences is very likely more heavily weighted than one mentioned in a single clause, even without a published number attached to either — CCDC 29's own guide to running a request for qualifications leaves exactly this kind of evaluation detail to the procurement authority's own best-practices judgment rather than fixing it. Guessing a weighting from the order and emphasis of the RFP’s own language is not the same as inventing one; it is reading the document for the signal it is actually giving.
Most firms bid the same handful of flagship projects repeatedly, which is efficient and also risky — a reused paragraph written to satisfy a different RFP’s criteria often does not actually answer the new one, even though it reads smoothly and mentions the right project. The fix is not to rewrite every project from scratch each time; it is to keep the underlying project facts (scope, value, schedule, role, outcome, reference contact) as a stable reference set, and rebuild the framing sentence — the part that connects the project to this specific RFP’s stated criterion — fresh for every submission. That framing sentence is usually one or two lines, and it is the difference an evaluator notices between a proposal that was clearly written for their project and one that was clearly written for someone else’s.
A hypothetical RFP’s evaluation table allocates 15 of 100 total points to “similar project experience,” requiring five named similar projects, and caps the experience section at two pages — a constructed scenario for the arithmetic, not a real tender’s table.
Read literally, the 15 points split evenly across the five required projects: 15 ÷ 5 = 3 points per project. A firm that spends most of its two-page allocation on rich detail across only two of the five required projects — however well-written those two entries are — can score at most 3 × 2 = 6 of the available 15 points, or 40% of that criterion, because there is nothing written for an evaluator to award the remaining three projects’ worth of marks against. A firm that instead gives all five required projects a shorter, evenly weighted treatment — sacrificing depth on any single one — starts from a ceiling of the full 15 points and is competing on quality within that ceiling, not against a self-imposed cap the page-allocation choice created before scoring even began.
Generally not as an answer to a similarity-scored criterion — an evaluator working against a stated value band or sector will not credit a project outside it on that specific line item, even where it demonstrates real capability that might help elsewhere in the submission.
Enough for an evaluator to confirm role, scope, value, and outcome against the RFP's own stated criteria without needing to look anything up — see how references are scored in a tender for what a verifier will actually be checking a project claim against.
That depends on the specific RFP's own rules, which no single Canadian standard governs uniformly — some evaluation tables allow reuse, others expect distinct examples per criterion, and the bid documents themselves, not a general assumption, decide which applies.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether your page allocation is capping your own score.
