CEng Application Process - Feedback / Discussion

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? 

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?