Should I apply for IEng or CEng and is there any particular requirements?

Hi,

The first comment I would make is that there are plenty of people that achieve CEng with a bachelors degree.

Technically, the Engineering Council defines the requirement for a CEng as an accredited bachelors plus an accredited masters (or an accredited integrated masters). Therefore the first challenge is to demonstrate that your 5 1/2 years of experience provides the equivelent learning outcomes to that accredited masters. This is a fairly challenging analysis.

The second part is the competencies. Your question suggests that you have already looked at the competence statements. There is a lot of commonality between IEng and CEng. I would always recommend looking at the places where the wording of the competence differs between IEng and CEng, as these are often key. As an example, C1/C2 uses the word "significant".

It may be that you have some gaps. It may be that there are many areas that you can already demonstrate the compences.

Ultimately it depends what those gaps are. C1/C2 can often be a challenge because you essentially have to be taking some responsibility for aspects of a "reasonably" sized project. Note this doesn't mean you are managing people (although that can be helpful).

But if you were a project engineer, that was not having any responsibility for either technical direction, people or project delivery, then I would say you may not be able to demonstrate those competences.

Note; I'm not a PRA/PRI for the IET (I'm a PRA for a different institution), so I don't know the precise details fo the IET's process.

Mark

Hi Tanvir,

(I started writing this at the same time that Mark posted his, so there will be some overlap!)

I would actually slightly disagree with Mark on the C competences, maybe it's the nature of the industry but I tend to find that all the rail applicants I work with (and most applicants I work with these days are in the rail industry) meet their C competences easily, whether IEng or CEng. It's an industry where most engineers spend as much time or more project managing - even if just their own work - as they do engineering.

I would say it's the As and Bs that are more of a challenge. Hopefully you've picked up that the difference is whether you are taking technical responsibility for complex, high risk, or novel technical decisions. In the railway industry this can be quite challenging to show, as almost all of of our work is to standards and processes, so it can actually be quite difficult to know when you have crossed the IEng / CEng boundary. The key thing is is difficult to get CEng until you can show a couple of nice examples where projects needed your technical judgement as to whether to go with option A or option B to solve a problem - and that there was some level of complexity or risk in that judgement. However you do have the advantage that many of the judgements we have to make do involve managing significant levels of risk, some are quite complex, and a few are novel.

But taking your question as "should I apply for IEng with certainty now, hold off for a while and apply for CEng, or risk applying for CEng now", it's of course difficult without knowing where you are now, and it also depends why you want to apply. Which in turn depends what the attitude of your employer is. It sounds as if you have helpful staff in your company, I would tend to suggest that if they think you are best delaying for 6 months while you gain CEng experience then that may be the best thing to do. I may be wrong, but this may mean that they don't see IEng as being a big advantage in your career in that organisation, so if you are that close to applying for CEng - which may have more benefit in your company - then it is worth waiting for.

I'd be happy to give some more personal advice if you want to PM me, as I say I do a lot of PRA'ing in the rail industry - I'm not taking on any more PRA work as I'm already overloaded but I'd be happy to give a quick opinion. 

Thanks,

Andy 

I think different industries have strengths and weaknesses, some candidates I find struggle on the A's and B's, others on the C's. Ds and E's don't seem to have a dependency.

But I would always agree with Andy!

Absolutely, software engineers for example can be a real challenge for Cs. The rail industry is famous for its technology moving incredibly slowly, plus for safety and cost justification reasons projects take a vast amount of management, so the huge numbers of engineers it employs do tend to spend an unusually large percentage of their time just trying to manage their projects! (I consider myself very lucky to have always worked on the innovation side, so have mostly dodged that...) 

Where I find there can be challenges on the "management" side for rail engineers, which is on the boundary of B's and C's, is showing personal management of technical decisions. I often spend quite a bit of time with applicants making sure it is clear how they are taking leadership responsibilities for their decisions, "seeing them through", getting feedback and adapting them accordingly, etc. This can be difficult in an industry where several different departments can be involved in a single project (I've found military applicants can have the same problem.) Usually we do manage to find the evidence, but it can take some digging. I find the important thing is to make clear that, how ever many people were involved in approving and implementing the decision, all these people were relying on the applicants technical judgement.