I’m Rob, the Rail Design Director at SEP Rail Design. I first heard about Professional Registration a few years after I joined the industry – back in around 2005. I joined Corus Railway Infrastructure Services straight from high school, and as a young lad, the concept of Professional Registration didn’t mean anything to me.

I was pointed towards the ICE (The Institution of Civil Engineers) and told to join as a student member. I was also assigned a mentor to help me through the process. We met every 3 months to discuss what I’d been doing, and I produced a couple of summary reports, I presume to retrospectively review them helping me complete the competence and commitment evidence. This went on for 6-12 months but eventually fizzled out, we both became busy on various projects, and the Professional Registration took a back seat.

Years went by, and now and then, the subject of Professional Registration would crop up during a yearly appraisal/development review, always met with an enthusiastic response, but ultimately, was never enforced or followed up on. As usual, project work took priority, and the Professional Registration fell by the wayside.

It was about 2-3 years ago that I decided I wanted to do this; it was off the back of a throw-away comment made by a well-respected colleague on a presentation I’d given on S&C geometry. “Why haven’t you delivered this as part of a Professional Review interview for Chartership?”, he asked, as I concluded the talk.

At that point, I thought “Maybe I could go for Chartership… maybe this was achievable?”. In all honesty, it had always looked a bit tricky and daunting. I knew I was underqualified academically (this had come to light during the final few years of my part-time BSc in Civil Engineering – at which point I’d given up hope of ever becoming chartered). However, I made a commitment to myself to give it a go. After all, with the ever-increasing popularity of the likes of LinkedIn, everyone else seemed to be gaining Professional Registration and other accolades. I didn’t want to fall behind!

My colleague, and subsequent mentor, spoke further, and their initial suggestion was to undertake EngTech. This was just to “get something under my belt”, and get me in the mindset for undertaking one of these submissions – so I did.

The hardest part of the EngTech application was documenting my CPD. Whilst I’d done plenty of CPD, I didn’t always realise that it was CPD, and I had never needed to keep a record of it, so it took quite a long time to go back through my calendar, noting when certain events had taken place, and even longer to recall what I had learnt and how it had influenced me.

My advice to anyone, regardless of professional registration aspirations, would be to maintain a CPD log as soon as possible. Doing it as a passive task takes very little time at all, however, trying to create one from scratch to cover at least 2 years is quite daunting and time-consuming! Logging CPD whilst remote working can be even easier; for those with multiple/large screens, I’ve found that it’s best to have the CPD log open on one screen, and the presenter/standard/publication on the other screen so that I can make notes as key points arise.

Success on the EngTech application inspired me to take the next step – I knew I needed to do something to bridge the academic gap between BSc and MSc, and fortunately, the PWI had just launched the Experiential Learning Route. I was thrilled when the Experiential Learning Route came along, as it lent itself to someone with my type of experience, (plenty of in-depth involvement on a wide variety of smaller, technically challenging projects) to bridge the academic gap to Level 7 without returning to formal education.

The Experiential Learning Report was tricky, but quite a good challenge. I think I was one of the first to have a go at it, and The PWI were very helpful and accommodating, even offering to increase the word count if I felt the 2000-word limit wasn’t enough. They also let me know that they expected a +/-10% tolerance on it, so I decided to try and see how I got on. I think I ended up at around 2300 words in the end, so definitely pushed the boundary, but not unacceptably so, it would seem.

The hardest part is fitting all the content in to show you’ve met all the requirements of a Masters-level qualification through your day-to-day experience. There are 17 requirements in total, so around 120-130 words for each requirement. Some can be combined, but it’s not a lot of words to prove you can do something competently. I found myself increasingly resorting to hyphenating anything that could be hyphenated to bring the word count down as much as possible.

Fortunately, I’m still fairly fluent in MicroStation, so made the best use of some A3 drawing borders and crammed them full of extra graphics (scans of calculations, photos, drawing extracts and notes etc.) which give the reader a lot of information, but doesn’t count towards the total word-count.

I submitted the Experiential Learning Report and then waited patiently for the outcome. I later found out that I’d passed, and not only that, that The PWI wanted to use the report as the exemplar on their website. This was a huge confidence boost going into the Professional Review Report for the Chartered Engineer submission.

To be completely transparent; I used most of the EngTech and Experiential Learning submission content in the CEng submission, it’s almost all applicable. I needed to add extra bits to cover all of the competence and commitment criteria, but I’d say at least 50% of the CEng report came from previous submissions. So please don’t think that doing an EngTech is a waste of time; because it’s not! It’s a great stepping-stone to the next level in your career, and pretty much all of your material can be re-worded and adapted to form part of your next submission.

So, what did I gain from becoming Chartered? For me, when I reviewed the competence and commitment criteria, I found I was able to “shoehorn” a lot of my experience into each of the categories – but not all of them. Some of the examples were difficult to relate to, and that’s where a good mentor will be able to make suggestions as to how your experience may be looked at from a different perspective to prove the required competence. Anything you really can’t find an example for is a good indicator as to where you may require improvement and extra experience.

I was particularly lacking in requirement E3 – this one changed slightly from previous versions of UK-SPEC and is now titled “Understand the principles of sustainable development and apply them in their work”. I’d been aware of issues surrounding sustainability and the environment, but not enough to be able to evidence something tangible. So, this became a focal point for development to ensure I had all the required experience to meet the criteria.

Luckily, the next job I worked on lent itself to evidencing requirement E3. It’s not always easy to do this in certain lines of work (renewals designer, for example…), but with the criteria of UK-SPEC and my goal of Chartership clear in mind, I was inspired to apply some additional thinking to the scheme.

To meet the requirements of criteria E3, I proposed a few subtle, but “more sustainable” suggestions – namely installing Sand Blanket Replacement Geotextile (SBRG) in place of a physical sand blanket – saving on spoil and fill; installing under sleeper and bearer pads throughout – reducing ballast attrition and increasing the period between track renewal interventions; and the re-use of some existing G44 concrete sleepers. Hardly ground-breaking alterations but enough to prove I had sufficient knowledge and was able to put it into practice for the benefit of a project.

Feedback from the Professional Review suggested this was still one of my weaker areas, but that’s fine; you don’t need to be “top-of-the-class” at everything. Well, other than E2 – “Understand the safety implications of your role and manage, apply and improve safe systems of work”. Anything that remains an area for improvement helps form your next future goals and development plan.

Until I’d been through the process, I didn’t necessarily see the benefits of Chartership, but once you’ve done it, you’ll probably gain a newfound appreciation for what it takes to achieve this. It’s within reach for most people but requires a good degree of discipline, organisation, and drive to achieve the end goal. Once you can confidently say you can meet all the competence and commitment criteria for the required registration level; it’s a good indicator that you’re a well-rounded engineer, with a hint of enthusiasm and initiative.

If you can already confidently say you meet all the required competence and commitment criteria for each respective level of membership then perhaps you won’t gain an awful lot from it, other than the letters after the name… but equally, it won’t take a terrible amount of effort to run through the process either. So, why not do it?

Find out more about your next steps to achieve Professional Registration.