What a consultant CV commits you to in a World Bank tender

The CV is one of the things being scored

In a World Bank–financed selection of consultants, the CVs of the key experts are not annexes that support the proposal. They are part of what the evaluation committee scores, against criteria, sub-criteria and a point system that the client has published in the Data Sheet before proposals were due. That changes what a weak CV costs. It is not a presentation problem that a strong methodology section can offset — it is points that were available and were not collected, in a process where falling under the minimum technical score removes the proposal from consideration before the financial envelope is ever opened.

One CV per position, and no alternates

Teams that come from commercial bidding sometimes want to hedge a critical role — a first choice and a fallback, so the client can pick. The Standard RFP forecloses that, and the penalty is not a deduction. A proposal that offers alternatives for a key expert position is non-responsive, which means it is set aside without being scored at all. The related rule is easy to confuse with this one and works differently: a firm may submit only one proposal per selection, but its staff may appear as key or non-key experts in more than one proposal where circumstances justify it and the Data Sheet permits it. Sharing a named individual across competing bids is therefore conditional and specific to the selection, while offering two candidates for one seat is never allowed.

Naming an expert who has not confirmed is a disqualification risk

This is the rule with the widest gap between how serious it is and how often it is discussed. Under deadline pressure it is ordinary for a bid team to enter a plausible name against a role, reasoning that the person will almost certainly agree and that the paperwork can follow. The Standard RFP treats that as two separate grounds for disqualification: the expert was not available at the time of submission, or the expert was included without their confirmation. Both are statements about a state of affairs on submission day, which is the practical point — proving you were compliant means holding something dated, from the expert, that predates the deadline. A confirmation obtained afterwards does not describe the same fact.

The certification, and the second signature

Form TECH-6 ends with a certification and two signature blocks: one for the expert, and one for the authorized representative of the consultant — the form specifies the same person who signs the proposal. The certification is not a formality about accuracy alone. It contains an availability undertaking and an acknowledgement of consequences that reach the individual, not only the firm. Read together with the rule above, the two signatures are the mechanism: the firm's signatory is personally attesting, on every CV in the submission, that the person named has confirmed and is available.

Substituting an expert does not recover the score

People leave, and proposal validity periods get extended. The Standard RFP allows a substitution at validity extension, on written justification and evidence the client accepts, and requires the replacement to have equal or better qualifications and experience. What it does not do is re-score. The technical evaluation continues to rest on the CV of the original key expert, so a firm that replaces a strong named individual with someone merely comparable keeps the points it earned — and a firm that could only find someone weaker faces rejection rather than a lower score. The practical consequence runs backwards into the bid decision: the right person to name is the one you can actually hold through validity, not the strongest CV you can borrow.

• why key-expert availability belongs in the bid/no-bid decision

The CV publishes your referees

The employment-record instruction on Form TECH-6 asks for more than dates and job titles. It asks for the contact information of previous clients and employing organizations who can be reached for references, and it tells the expert to leave out employment that is not relevant to the assignment. Two things follow. The first is that every CV you submit exposes a working phone number or address for someone outside your firm, whose willingness to answer you have not necessarily checked and whose details decay quietly over time. The second is that the CV is not a career history — it is a filtered record assembled for this assignment, which is why a single stored document reused across tenders is usually the wrong artefact.

“Adequacy for the assignment” is a mapping, not a summary

The last table on the CV form has two columns. On the left go the detailed tasks assigned to that expert — the form directs you to list them as they appear in Form TECH-5, the description of approach, methodology and work plan. On the right goes the reference to prior work that best illustrates the capability to handle those specific tasks. This is a different writing task from summarising a career. It requires that the deliverables in your work plan already be settled before the CVs are finalised, and it requires, for each task, a nameable past assignment that an evaluator could look up. A team that writes CVs and methodology in parallel usually discovers the mismatch after submission.

• turning approved project experience into claims an evaluator can verify

The technical score stays with the CV you submitted, even after the person on it has been replaced. You are not scored on who does the work — you are scored on whom you named.

Form TECH-6 is a price as much as a CV

It is easy to miss that the CV pages are a continuation of a form whose full title is Team Composition, Assignment, and Key Experts' inputs. The first part is a table of each expert's input in person-months against each deliverable, split between home and field, with subtotals. The document defines those units precisely, and the definitions carry directly into cost. So one form fixes who is proposed, for how many days, working where — and therefore at what rate. A CV edited without reference to that table produces an expert whose stated availability, assigned tasks and priced input do not agree, which is the kind of internal contradiction an evaluation committee is specifically reading for.

• the full set of TECH forms this one sits inside, and which are dropped in a Simplified proposal

Which makes this a records problem, not a formatting problem

Most published advice on donor CVs is about layout: which template, how many pages, what order. Layout is the last and cheapest step. Everything above says that what a firm actually needs is a set of maintained records about each expert, held before a tender appears rather than assembled inside the submission window. Concretely, and per expert:

• A dated confirmation of availability from the expert, held before submission rather than reconstructed after it.
• A signature you can obtain within the submission window, and a record of who last obtained one.
• Referee contacts that have been checked recently enough to be worth publishing, with an owner responsible for refreshing them.
• Past assignments recorded at task level, so a claim about capability can be mapped to a specific engagement rather than to a job title.
• Language competence recorded as the working languages the expert can actually deliver in, since the form asks only for those.
• A history of where the expert has already been named, because sharing an individual across proposals is conditional and needs to be visible before it is promised twice.

• how ProposalOS governs expert records with owners and versions
• what this looks like for firms bidding into donor-funded programmes

What this does not cover

Every clause above is from one document: the World Bank's Standard Request for Proposals for the selection of consulting firms. Other financiers publish their own forms and their own rules, and the differences are not cosmetic — the European Union's instruments turn on a distinction between key and non-key experts with its own documentary consequences, and the African Development Bank and the Islamic Development Bank each run different sequences. Individual requests for proposals also modify the Data Sheet, which is where selection-specific requirements are set, so the governing text for your bid is the one you were sent rather than the standard template. We keep the cross-institution comparison as a separate maintained reference.

• the Donor Proposal Requirements Library, with each rule traced to its source document