For CORs

Contracting Officer’s Representatives

Plain-language training and tools for the people who actually watch the work get done. Some of you have been CORs longer than your COs have been COs — this track is being built for you.

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This track is under construction. The COR audience is too big and too underserved to leave on the shelf, so I'm starting to scaffold it now. The roadmap below is what's planned. If you're a COR with a topic to add, tell me what you wish you'd known on day one.

Why This Exists

The CO signs the contract. The COR makes it work.

CORs do most of the day-to-day contract administration on services contracts — surveillance, technical direction, performance evaluation, invoice review — but the formal training is uneven, dated, or focused on appointment paperwork instead of the actual job. This track is being built to fix that.

The voice is from a CO’s perspective: what we actually need from CORs, what gets contracts in trouble when CORs miss things, and how to do the surveillance documentation that protects the contract file when something goes sideways.

Live now

Annual COR File Reviews

What an annual COR file review actually checks — the existing guide on what stays in the COR file, what doesn’t, and how to pass an inspection.

Live now

Type A Training

COR Type A training overview and contract-specific training notes — current training-page entries to lean on while the rest of this track gets built.

Planned

📝 Surveillance That Actually Works

How to design a surveillance plan that catches problems before they become contract issues. QASP basics, sampling, deliverable acceptance, and what to write down vs. what to email the CO about.

Planned

📊 Performance Assessment Without the Theater

Writing CPARs and interim performance memos that hold up. What ratings actually mean, how to write narratives that survive a contractor rebuttal, and how to coordinate with the CO before submission.

Planned

📁 The COR File, Demystified

The full file index in plain language. What goes in, what doesn’t, what the CO needs you to keep, and what gets returned at contract close-out. Templates included.

Planned

⚠️ The Stuff That Gets You In Trouble

Unauthorized commitments, scope creep, accepting performance you shouldn’t, “just this once” technical direction. The patterns COs see go wrong and how CORs avoid them.

Planned

👨‍🏫 Training Your Replacement

If you’ve been CORing the same contract for 8 years, the institutional knowledge is in your head. A practical handover playbook so the next COR doesn’t start from zero.

Planned

💲 Invoice Review for CORs

Reading WAWF, catching pricing or rate errors, knowing when to certify and when to push back. With the contract terms ever-shifting under the FAR Overhaul, this is moving target territory.

Who this is for

Anyone appointed as a COR — primary, alternate, or contract-specific — in any agency. Whether this is your full-time role or a collateral duty, the track is designed for both.

No 1102 background assumed. The track translates contracting-officer perspective into language that helps CORs do their job and back the CO up when something goes wrong.