Hi William,

Personally I would suggest asking for another PRA. PRAs are individuals, and we do all take slightly different approaches. Personally I would at least have a conversation with a potential applicant before advising them that they needed more experience - whatever their paper application says, I find often a large part of the PRA role is uncovering aspects that the applicant didn't put in their application which explains why they may be eligible to apply. 

I expect that you'll appreciate that the open forum is not the place to discuss individual cases, so best you try restarting the conversation with a PRA through the official channels. As a very general point, Master's plus two years would be unusual to be enough time to gain the experience needed for CEng, and it may well be that a mentoring relationship would be appropriate for a couple of years to finish off the final competences, but in a conversation a PRA should be able to come to a clearer determination on that.

However, some PRAs will, quite reasonably, take the view that they are there to help the candidate "polish" their application when they have achieved all the competences, and that it is the role of the mentor to help the candidate gain the competences. If your application clearly did not show certain competences then the PRA was acting in their rights. But some of us do take a wider view (which we don't have to) that we can still help signpost candidates who are at that stage. Hence finding another PRA may be useful.

(I would offer to help but I'm swamped at the moment!) 

Good luck,

Andy

Hi William,

I fully agree with Andy's comments, but the part of the question he didn't answer is regarding using the "find a PRA" page of the website. I think that it would be appropriate, but a better option would be to ask the Registration team at IET to find a PRA who will have time to review your application and advise you where the shortfalls are (if any). Going through the website again may get a different PRA, but it doesn't guarantee a different response.

Best of luck with this,

Alasdair

Good day William,

I believe it isn't enough for a PRA to simply say a candidate require more experience. The PRA should refer to UK-SPEC as the baseline to explicitly identifying where gaps exist with candidate's application. This way the candidate will know exactly what further development is needed to become professionally registered. 

Yours respectfully, 

Ryan Collins 

Thank you all for your insightful replies. I should add that I have now noticed that I did actually receive an email from the mentoring team, I just missed it at the time, so I'm getting the form filled in for that.

Andy, I appreciated the detail on the role difference between mentors and PRAs. My understanding had been that PRAs were there to help you understand the competencies and to work out with you what experience you have to cover each one, but it seems that's actually more the mentor's job. I'll email the professional registration team (for anyone reading this later, profreginfo@theiet.org) to see if they can put me in touch with a new PRA.

Thanks again!

William