Normal
If you are being sponsored by a firm, you may not get to choose the timeframes unfortunately. They and the course provider are likely to choose this for you unless you needed to defer.It will be important to sit SQE assessments as close to the preparation course as possible, so a later assessment date may not always be a good idea. You would really need to speak to the prep course providers to find out how flexible they are in you accessing their SQE prep content to work out if you could delay the sitting of the assessments.In relation to the applications, it would make sense to make a mix of applications as you have suggested. As you already have some legal work experience, this will put you in a stronger position for direct TC applications, but as you have suggested, there will be some firms that recruit exclusively or extensively from vacation schemes that would make sense to make VS applications to.
If you are being sponsored by a firm, you may not get to choose the timeframes unfortunately. They and the course provider are likely to choose this for you unless you needed to defer.
It will be important to sit SQE assessments as close to the preparation course as possible, so a later assessment date may not always be a good idea. You would really need to speak to the prep course providers to find out how flexible they are in you accessing their SQE prep content to work out if you could delay the sitting of the assessments.
In relation to the applications, it would make sense to make a mix of applications as you have suggested. As you already have some legal work experience, this will put you in a stronger position for direct TC applications, but as you have suggested, there will be some firms that recruit exclusively or extensively from vacation schemes that would make sense to make VS applications to.