The Chartership Forum
Learn the engineering, qualify, and ask other engineers
Somewhere to learn civil engineering properly, work towards professional qualification using your own projects, and ask other engineers the questions that come up in between. It has four parts, and they refer to each other rather than sitting side by side.
What it is for
Four things the Forum tries to do
Engineers learn from material that explains the subject, from the work itself, and from other engineers. Those three usually sit in different places and never refer to one another. The Forum keeps them together, from a first degree through to chartered status and beyond it.
Teach the engineering, not just the answer
Courses in civil engineering that show the reasoning behind a result. Every number in a lesson is computed by a tested library rather than typed in, every diagram is drawn from a real solve, and every code value records the clause and the date it was read. You can check the engineering rather than take it on trust.
Carry you through professional development
Chartership is mostly a problem of evidence, not of knowledge. The guidance covers the route from a first degree to the professional review, works through the attributes ICE and IStructE assess, and helps you match your own project work to them — finding the gaps while there is still time to fill them, and turning what you have done into a submission that reads as engineering.
Be a community of engineers
Somewhere to ask the question you would rather not ask across the office, and somewhere to answer one. Students, engineers preparing for review and engineers thirty years in, in communities grouped by subject and by professional development — with seminars and CPD sessions kept afterwards rather than lost.
Build bridges between engineers, and between subjects
Civil engineering is one profession spread across bridges, buildings, tunnels, water and the ground under all of it, and split again between the people learning it and the people who have spent a career on it. The Forum keeps those in the same place and links them: a course points at the discussions about it, guidance on evidence points back at the engineering it draws on, and a question asked in one discipline can be found from another.
The four areas
Where things are
Taking part means registering, which is free. Before posting, read the community guidelines — particularly the parts on confidentiality and on what a forum answer is and is not.