EngineerAnon said:

Firstly, I want to use examples from when I completed my PhD to meet the criteria, however within the qualification part of Career Manager there is no space to write descriptions. This is only available in the Work Experience section. I propose making a second entry in Work Experience covering my PhD period and describing my evidence there? Is this acceptable? Does anyone have any other advice for using Academic experience within the CEng process?

Hi,

Generally it's not a good idea to do this, your PhD experience would not normally be used as evidence of CEng competence - it's experience of being a research student rather than a practicing engineer. If you want to use your PhD experience to describe how you developed skills that developed into your engineering competences then you'd usually do this in one of your engineering roles e.g. "Building on the research skills I'd developed during my PhD, I conducted research into..."

I had a good example of this recently with an applicant who couldn't see how they met they C competence from their work experience, so tried claiming it from their PhD experience. Actually, the PhD wasn't good enough for this, and in any case they did have plenty of experience in their work anyway - as very often happens they'd misunderstood (and overestimated) what was needed for the C competence.

Equally, I have seen applicants who are fundamentally project managers who therefore try to use their PhD experience for A (and maybe even B) competences. This can be trickier, if your employment has not required you to make any technical decisions / take any technical responsibility then you will struggle with a CEng application. But you'll probably only be able to use PhD experience if it was basically employment that happened to also award a doctorate i.e. (to put it simplistically) it is in a very commercial application. But see my note about PRAs below, every case is different.

EngineerAnon said:

the criteria being referred to is mentioned directly in the text, similar to referencing. 

I would add a note of caution to Gerard's advice though. Some assessors really hate this, their view is that it's up to them to decide whether a particular activity shows the relevant competence. We had a long internal debate about this a while back, and came to the conclusion that since those assessors that don't like it really don't like it, whilst the rest don't mind too much one way or another, then it's probably safer not to reference the competences in your final submission. But it can be helpful at least while you're drafting your submission to make sure that you have remembered to cover them all (particularly the E's!). 

Are you using a PRA? I'd really really strongly recommend it, we're free and helpful and can give detailed review advice on your specific application - every application is different (because every applicant is different). And if you did a particularly interesting PhD (from a commercial application viewpoint) it may be sensible to claim it as experience.

Good luck,

Andy 

Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed post!

What you say makes sense. In my personal case I was mainly looking to draw experience and output from my PhD to use for the A2 criteria as it was very close to commercial application and development. I take the point though that my other employment should really be enough to form the majority of the application.

I haven't contacted a PRA yet but I do intend to and will engage them. I decided to ask a few general questions on this forum before shaping my application - mainly so that I  can get some quick tips and not waste their time / or have to do a major rewrite.

If I may, could I ask a further question? If you have had 4 or 5 roles / employers, and wish to include evidence from all of them, do they all need to backed up by supporters from each company?

Thanks again for your help.

Hi,

Normally your most recent experience is the one where you are claiming you meet the competences, and your previous experience is demonstrating how you developed those competences. So the supporters normally only need to be from your most recent employer because they are supporting that you meet the competences today. The major exception tends to be when you have changed employer in, say the last 6-12 months, in which case you may also want to use supporters from your previous employment for some competences.

Very occasionally you need to use evidence from a somewhat earlier employment (if you absolutely can't show a specific competence has been met in recent employment, but was in earlier employment, again in my experience most commonly competence Cs), but personally in helping a very large number of applications as a PRA I've never come across an occasion where we've needed to use supporters for more than the last two employments, and 99.9% of the time it's only from the current employment. Usually current employers will be able to endorse that they are satisfied that you could demonstrate the relevant competence in your current role if you were required to. 

In summary the point of the career and education history prior to your current role is to make sure that you have a credible story to back up the position you are currently holding, but what you're actually being assessed on (again simplifying slightly) is whether you act as a professional engineer today. 

Hope that clarifies,  

Thanks,

Andy

Thanks again for clarifying. I'll discuss further with my PRA the detail of my application, employers and specific evidence, but your answer is again very helpful.

Thanks again for clarifying. I'll discuss further with my PRA the detail of my application, employers and specific evidence, but your answer is again very helpful.