CEng Application Process - Feedback / Discussion

Dear Jason,


Will you consider to change job after you gain CEng status? This is one of the question I was being asked in my PRI. Will you be thinking about your career in future?

That's an interesting insight, I hadn't heard of that being asked.


"Are you going to change jobs after CEng" is not a question I personally would ask - after all, what do you do with the answer? Whether the candidate says "yes" or "no" they are still equally likely to be at CEng level at the point of interview. However, "how are you going to continue to stay up to date and develop in your field" (slightly different spin) is a very valid question.


But different interviewers will approach this from slightly different angles so always best to be prepared! As ever, the right answer is the honest answer.

My current career / job status was discussed - mostly because it had changed since I had the application verified. We discussed a little bit about future career but not any specific intentions to change employers or jobs.


In my case, I am always (everyday) thinking about my future career - CEng or not. I learnt early on in my career that there is no such thing as a job for life or have any expectation that I can forge my entire career within one organisation / employer. I think that should be the case whether you are CEng / engineer / non-engineer... In this modern world, you have to always review your career / learning options in order to stay relevant and useful. I certainly do not wish to be caught out by having the wrong skills and knowledge as the ways of the world changes.


Will give more detailed feedback about my experience of the process after I my result comes in.

Some interesting issues arise from this emphasis. Careers with one organisation are rarer than they were in the past, but there are still many relatively stable organisations of sufficient scale and scope to offer long-term career development and progression. I came across an example today of someone who had progressed in a major business from Apprentice Electrician to a Director.  Long-service is less common than in the past, but far from rare. There is evidence that recent graduates are less likely to be loyal to an employer than those trained via apprenticeships for example, although there may be many contributing social factors, such as debts to pay?  However I couldn’t disagree with the statement In this modern world, you have to always review your career / learning options in order to stay relevant and useful. I certainly do not wish to be caught out by having the wrong skills and knowledge as the ways of the world changes.  

 

In a previous role, my organisation had some mixed  experiences of employees contact with professional engineering institutions. We invested more heavily than competitors in training engineers and suffered from “poaching”. Because the mind-set of the typical PEI was heavily biased towards design, in preference to project engineering (our major activity), PEI representatives advised employees to “get a job with a design consultancy, if you want to be Chartered” or “do a Masters Degree” at a time when total commitment within the workplace was needed. The PEI concerned (not The IET), like many had relatively low respect for activities that might be considered IEng. Some who ignored their advice progressed rapidly to senior management.

 

It is perhaps for these reasons that there are large swathes of industry where members of The Engineering Council family are struggling to demonstrate relevance and added value. Therefore my challenge to all new registrants would be; how to you intend to add value to your employer or customer proposition if self-employed?

 

For some employers this may include having more Chartered Engineers on their organisational CV , but there are many other ways that someone who has “gone the extra mile” to become a committed professional can add value. This takes me into the newest of the competences E5 or Ethics, which might lead me towards questions like; how to serve the profession, rather than any self-serving one-upmanship over other Engineers and Technicians. I’m afraid that too often in the past this has been the emphasis for some. Putting something back is often the best form of development, so "I want to volunteer to help guide or assess others coming through", would be a great answer for me!

 

Jason, making a constructive contribution in this forum as you have, illustrates just this sort of attitude. I hope that you get good news soon and have further opportunities to contribute. 

As promised, here is some feedback and advice from my experience of the professional registration process. It is a bit long. In case you don't make it to reading to the end, I got a positive result in the end.

My Backgorund

I am a late career registrant (almost 16 years after graduating from my MEng degree). I had always intended to get registered but it got pushed further and further back in my list of priorities. A discussion for another time but many of the organisations and peers I worked with were not overly enthusiastic about CEng registration. Why is it the case for many in the electronics industry? It seems to me that mechanical / civil engineers are much more eager to get professionally registered with their institutions. The IET needs to look in to the reasons and address this.


Finally got a push to make a real effort to get registered when a colleague got keen to get registered and engaged with the IET and got in a PRA to speak with interested people. Management buy-in and encouragement was also obtained – therefore they are more likely to spend time reviewing the application and hopefully verify and sign.


I am mostly from the traditional route (or half). I did an accredited MEng in electrical & electronics engineering degree at university. However, after that my path varied and I did not end up joining a large blue chip company to embark on a pre-defined training / rotations scheme to work towards professional registration.

Improvements / Suggestion

The IET needs to try and get some of the engineers who are more than competent and experienced to register for CEng to actually register. It would be good to try and get them to engage with the IET so that the IET can harness the expertise and experience of these engineers for the benefit of all IET members and the next generation of engineers and technicians.


I noted that after registration the IET membership fee actually goes up (in addition to the annual fee required for the Engineering Council). That was one of the arguments I have heard previously for not bothering to get registered - higher membership fee for no apparent increase in salary in becoming registered. Perhaps, one way to encourage more members to get registered is to actually lower the membership fees for those who are registered? Understand that the IET may be concerned about funding this and the apparent reduction in income from membership fees. However, perhaps it would result in more income in the long term if it attracts more members to join to and get professionally registered.


I would have welcomed more help and guidance for people who are not employed in a large blue chip company with dedicated schemes to get engineers professionally registered. That might even mean advising people to change jobs / roles in order to get the right kind of work experience.

Mentors

Early in my career (but with several years’ experience under my belt) I did speak to a mentor from the IET. Nice guy but didn’t get too much advice and guidance on how to progress to being in a position to have had enough experience to apply for CEng.


One of the toughest things to do is assessing your own experience and trying to decide if you have had enough experience at the right level to be able to meet the UK-SPEC CEng competencies comfortably.

Professional Registration Advisers (PRA)

Definitely recommend that everyone who is thinking about applying for professional registration passes a copy of their application to a PRA to review. My initial attempt was pretty much a cut and paste of my CV. Everything was very short and in almost a bullet point form. There was not enough detail. My next attempt went the other way and I wrote many examples of projects in high definition detail. It took several attempts and advice from various proof readers to cut out enough of the detail to reduce the page number to something more reasonable.


Another word of advice to potential applicants, don’t be afraid to find and ask a different PRA for help if your initial one is not proving to be of help. The PRA assigned to the company I was with at the time never got back to me with feedback on my application review. Not sure what his issue was (perhaps he just didn’t like me personally or was too busy). I went on the IET website and searched for a different PRA. He was much more helpful. I did not want to fail in my application especially as I was paying for it myself. I probably annoyed him no end with the number of iterations of my application I asked him to review. I really really really appreciated the help and feedback however (you know who you are).

Completing the Application Form

I completed my application form via Career Manager. If you haven’t yet noticed, submitting a paper application incurs a higher application fee. You can export your application as a PDF or Word document for printing and reviewing. It is worth looking through the page divisions and general formatting to make sure it looks sensible. I used some blank lines to shift things a bit when needed. The assessors will most likely be referring to a printed copy of your application.


Career Manager currently has limited formatting options in the text boxes.

Improvements / Suggestions:

Provide example applications or statements of experience / evidence (that are good).

Upgrade Career Manager to allow more formatting capabilities in the text boxes. This allows applicants the opportunity to provide a more clear layout to help out the assessors and highlight important things.

The Professional Review Interview (PRI)

The PRI assessors were very nice and put me at ease. However, at the end of it I was unsure if we had covered enough for me to pass the assessment. When asked if I had anything else to add I struggled to summarise everything that had been discussed and map it to the UK-SPEC competencies within a short space of time. It was my last chance try and cover off the UK-SPEC competencies but I had no idea what was missing or what was weak that needed more evidence to make a stronger case.

Improvements / Suggestions:

Feedback / Summary to candidate toward end of PRI. Highlight weak areas of coverage of UK-SPEC to allow candidate to think a bit and then try and provide further evidence / examples of how they meet those competencies.

Overall Timeline of the Process

The process overall has taken a long time to complete. Submitted in January, PRI in May, and result near the end of June. Still waiting to be fully registered with the Engineering Council.

Improvements / Suggestions:

More volunteer assessors needed. Perhaps a push to get more volunteers on board and appropriately trained to try and get more applications through at a faster rate while still maintaining the rigour, thoroughness, and attention to detail of the process.


Perhaps more volunteer PRI assessors would be available if some of the PRI’s are run on weekends as well. As a candidate I would have loved it to have been a weekend as I would not have had to take time off work (as a contractor, it is an expensive day off). I would imagine as a volunteer (who is in full time work) it would be easier to find a free weekend than it would be to get a day off work to support this IET activity or justify spending a day’s annual holiday. Would that potentially improve the range / number of volunteers that can support the registration process? 

Congratulations Jason! Thanks for the feedback and for sharing your experience with others.  

Well done Jason on achieving your CEng, and thank you for taking the time to feedback on your experience.

I am a relatively recent CEng too and your experience of the process echoes mine.

I can assure you, there are no tricky questions! The purpose of the discussion is to expose the experiences you have had and how they might fit the criteria. Most people are reluctant to talk about themselves and it's only by someone questioning them that all the relevant facts are brought out. The PRA will also be able to suggest examples of the level of work which would meet the criteria and so prompt the candidate to think of similar experiences in their past work.

Regards

Hamish