OST Global Solutions is the home of the Bid & Proposal Academy. We have codified our best practices in our courses, and we teach these processes and techniques that we use to win at the highest level of Government contracting – from small to large contracts.

Our Bid & Proposal Academy provides training for business development, proposal, and project professionals. Newcomers to the field use our courses to build a solid foundation, while professionals with decades of experience gain a greater understanding of the finer points and nuance needed to gain a competitive edge.

Win more contracts by training your business development team with our instructor-practitioners. We offer multiple training solutions to meet your needs.

Business Development & Proposal Public Training Courses

We offer 15 public courses multiple times per year. All courses are currently virtual and presented by live instructors. Our courses are based on key principles that differentiate us from others in the market:

1. Our class content is continuously updated based on the latest best practices and trends. We don’t teach stale proposal principles from the last decade. We build on what has worked for years and continuously adjust the training to match changing procurement realities and competitive landscape.
2. Our participants learn far more than just process. We focus our courses on the how-to instructions of winning government proposals, including the tools and shortcuts available.
3. Our class materials contain embedded multimedia and graphics-rich animated slides, complete with hands-on exercises and discussions. We use interactive adult learning techniques to maximize understanding and retention.
4. Our instructors are practicing proposal professionals who offer valuable insights to our students. Our instructors can answer tough questions as they come up during the course. They can also tailor the material to their students’ specific challenges and share their experience based on the current realities.

Our one and two-day seminars are conducted at our training facility in Rockville, Maryland. Live webcast options are available for those who do not want to travel — you can take the entire course from your desk. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection.

• Writing Persuasive Government Proposals
• Winning Government Cost Proposals
• How to Develop a Compliant Proposal
• Proposal Graphics Conceptualization and Design Workshop
• Desktop Publishing for Proposal Professionals (Microsoft Word)
• Preparing & Winning Multiple Award & Task Order Proposals
• Proposal Editing Workshop

Each course counts as 3 CEUs toward your APMP accreditation and/or toward PDUs for your PMP certification. These courses may also count toward other certifications that you hold — check with the certifying body to confirm.

The Bid & Proposal Academy’s headquarters are in Rockville, Maryland. We normally host public courses in our training room, but we are 100% virtual due to COVID-19 restrictions. We look forward to hosting in-person classes again once it’s safe to do so.

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Onsite or Virtual Corporate Training & Custom Options

We offer corporate training tailored to the specific challenges facing your business or business unit. Our modular courses can be combined in any way to meet your training goals. We can also design class exercises around your past proposals or a live pursuit to maximize your team’s engagement and retention.

Our course catalog with all class descriptions and modules is available for download.

We offer onsite or virtual trainings in a variety of formats, which include:

1. Concentrated one-day training focused on specific topics customized to your immediate needs.
2. Multiple-day training options on a variety of topics to address skill and knowledge gaps in your business development organization. We typically deliver these over the course of two to five days.
3. Distance learning for your staff spread across multiple locations. We can deliver the entire course at once or split it into a series of webcasts. We can provide day-long live training or split it into a series of trainings taught over breakfast or lunch to reduce your staff’s time away from daily activities.
4. Provide just-in-time training for your entire proposal team for your strategic pursuits, in person or via a webinar.

We have accommodated a wide range of requests to ensure our clients get the most value out of their training budgets.

Additional courses are available for onsite training. The following courses are only available as custom training:

• Solution Development: A course highly recommended for capture managers, proposal managers, solutions architects, and proposal writers. It combines elements of our Win Themes Development, Advanced Proposal Development, and Advanced Capture Management classes.
• The Art of Capture: An aggregate course that combines topics in the Foundations and Advanced Capture Management courses.
• Winning Government Proposals: An aggregate course that combines topics in the Foundations and Advanced Proposal Management courses.
• Color Team Review Training: How to Raise Proposal Quality Through Effective Color Team Reviews: A course recommended for your reviewers, this class offers step-by-step guidance on how to make the most of your Pink, Red, and other color review teams.

Reach out to us if you would like to schedule time to talk about your training objectives.

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Business Development Specialist Apprenticeship

Our Government Business Development Apprenticeship program is a comprehensive, one-year training program that delivers coursework and certifies skills for Business Development Specialists through the Department of Labor. The apprenticeship combines 160 hours of job-related instruction to obtain national skills standards and on-the-job training provided by the apprentice employer.

We designed the program to ensure that Apprentices deliver a real return on investment by learning exactly how to perform specific BD-related tasks. Apprentices complete one part of the program monthly, allowing them to immediately apply their knowledge and contribute in a greater capacity to BD efforts.

Employers use this Government-certified program to prepare their future workforce with essential BD skills for government contracting. Our curriculum covers the entire Business Development lifecycle, including opportunity identification, pipeline management, capture, and proposal development.

The program consists of 12 parts that Apprentices can access through our online Learning Management System (LMS), with live attendance available to academic classes. Participants must pass skills tests at each segment of the program to progress further, so you can have confidence that your staff is learning.

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Business Development Specialist Apprenticeship for Veterans

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will cover veterans’ and eligible dependents’ training costs for OST’s Apprenticeship program in Government Business Development. Employers of veterans or their qualified survivors and dependents will grow their business by sending staff to our full-scale training program in BD, capture, and proposals. Our training enables veteran Apprentices to deliver a real return on investment as they apply their new business development knowledge learned from each month’s lessons to their jobs.

Veterans, members of the National Guard or Reserves, and qualified survivors or dependents can find out about eligibility to apply their VA education benefits to our Apprenticeship program through the GI Bill and other VA educational assistance programs.

Veterans may be eligible for funding for the program under any of the following programs:

• Chapter 30: Montgomery GI Bill
• Chapter 31: Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment Services
• Chapter 33: Post 9/11 GI Bill
• Chapter 35: Survivors’ and Dependents’ Educational Assistance
• Chapter 1606: Montgomery GI Bill Selected Reserve Program

Reach out to us for more information and our experts can walk you through the registration process.

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SBIR/STTR Proposal Lab

Maryland’s TEDCO, OST, and the Small Business Development Center (Team TEDCO) have teamed together and will select up to 25 companies to participate in OST’s next SBIR/STTR Proposal Lab. Every year, Team TEDCO will run a Proposal Lab tailored to assist Maryland small businesses to develop and submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a Phase I award up to $256,000. The Proposal Lab runs from January 12, 2022 through June 2022. The competitive application process will close on December 15, 2022. If you qualify, you will receive an invitation to a virtual interview.

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Self-Study Courses

OST offers many self-study trainings and products for people who learn better at their own pace or do not have time to participate in a public training. We are currently in the process of turning all of our public courses into self-study courses that can be purchased on demand.

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