[neel_k]

When I went to one of these things, it was pretty much entirely about how to scope the work and how to write the proposal. Eg, for a big ERC grant, you need to propose something big and exciting enough to be worth 2 million euros, but small enough that you and 3 students/postdocs can do it in five years, since that's what 2 million euros can pay for. But our grant office did make sure that most of the speakers were people who had actually applied for these grants in the last round.

One really key thing for me was to reach out to senior colleagues in the same area (definitely not just at the same university) to get multiple examples of what successful grant applications look like. There's a bunch of text in the grant call, but the panel are going to be senior in-area academics who may know what a good application looks like, but won't necessarily be able to articulate all the rules.

Everyone I know finds writing proposals hard. So much of writing papers is being careful about citing prior work and not over-claiming for your results, but for grant proposals we are basically forced to make big claims about things that we have not done. However, it's worth noting that no one on the panels or at the grant agencies see research proposals as binding promises to do certain work: they mostly all want you to follow the science and change course if you spot something better.