Phase 3 · Complete your IPD
The Career Appraisal report
How the Career Appraisal report works — including the one respect in which it differs from a Professional Review report.
Who this is for:Candidates at any stage
The Career Appraisal report is a narrative of your experience against the attributes. It is close to a Professional Review report in most respects — and different in one that catches people out.
What ICE asks for
Institution of Civil Engineers
- The report is a vehicle to demonstrate to the assessors how you have met the attributes. Do not address them in sequence — give a narrative, from your role activities, that lets assessors see how you met them all at the required level.
- You must clearly state at the end of each paragraph and/or section which attributes you have demonstrated, referencing the attribute or attributes by number.
- Emphasise your responsibilities and experience for each attribute. Expand on decisions you made, problems you met, and occasions when you gained unusual or extensive experience and learned valuable lessons.
- Clearly indicate your role by giving the background to the important decisions you were responsible for, or made a significant contribution to, and show where you exercised independent judgement.
- Put particular emphasis on one or two projects in which you played a major part. At Chartered level, also describe how you took a lead in some or all of the elements.
- Professional layout, with a table of contents and of appendices. Tables of figures and lists of abbreviations do not count towards the word limit. Hyperlink between sections — but never to anything outside the application.
- Career Appraisal report length
- 5000wordsAt either IEng MICE or CEng MICE level.
- Career Appraisal top-up report length (IEng MICE to CEng MICE)
- 3000wordsFor an existing IEng MICE using Career Appraisal to top up IPD to CEng level. The report covers the additional CEng responsibilities and professional commitment only.
- Appendices — A3 sides
- 3sides of A3
- Appendices — A4 sides
- 12sides of A4CPD records sit outside this limit.
From Career Appraisal Guidance, Institution of Civil Engineers.
Writing it
The report has to do two things at once: read as an account of a career, and let an assessor tick off every attribute. Those pull in opposite directions, and the attribute referencing is what reconciles them — the narrative carries the reader, the references carry the assessor.
For the progressive top-up the shape changes. You have 3,000 words, and ICE suggests concentrating on significant work carried out since your success at the Incorporated Professional Review, used to show how the additional Chartered attributes were achieved. Resist the temptation to summarise your whole career first. The assessors already know you are IEng MICE.
A workable order of writing
- 01
Map before you write
Put your projects against the seven areas and find which one or two carry the most. Use the evidence matrix if it helps. Writing first and mapping afterwards produces a report that has to be rebuilt.
- 02
Choose your one or two principal projects
ICE asks for particular emphasis on projects where you played a major part. Two is usually better than one, because it shows range; four is usually worse than two, because nothing gets any depth.
- 03
Write the decisions, not the projects
The project is context. What is being assessed is what you decided, what you rejected, what went wrong and what you did about it.
- 04
Add the attribute references last
Write the narrative first so it reads properly, then go back and reference the attributes at the end of each paragraph or section. Doing it the other way round produces prose shaped around the list.
- 05
Check coverage with your mentor
ICE asks you to check — with your mentor, if you have one — that you have clearly demonstrated all the attributes at the required level. That check is the last thing to do, not the first.
Fictional example
Attribute referencing that works, and referencing that does not
Fictional example — water industry, framework designer
Weaker
I managed the design of the inlet works and delivered it successfully, meeting all the requirements of the client. (Attributes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
Stronger
The original inlet arrangement needed a 4 m deep chamber in running sand, with well-point dewatering and a permanent pumped drain. I proposed raising the invert by 1.1 m and accepting a shallower gradient, which removed the dewatering entirely and cut the excavation by about 240 m³. I checked the hydraulic capacity at the design storm and confirmed the loss of gradient was acceptable with a 6 per cent margin; I set out the residual risk of surcharge in an extreme event for the client to accept. (Attributes 1, 4, 5)
Why — The weaker version references seven attributes and evidences none. The stronger version references three and evidences all three — a design decision with a stated basis, a hazard removed, and a quantified resource reduction. Assessors read a lot of the first kind; a paragraph claiming everything usually demonstrates nothing.
Related pages and tools
- Career AppraisalHow experienced engineers complete IPD from work already done: what it is, what it asks for, and what the outcomes mean.
- Career Appraisal: documentsEverything that goes in, the format ICE requires, and the limits that get an application returned unassessed.
- Evidence qualityThe difference between being present, contributing and being responsible — and how to make your own competence visible.
- The report5,000 words in which two strangers have to see your competence: what ICE asks for, how to structure it, and how to edit it.
- AttributesWhat ICE assesses, how the Incorporated and Chartered expectations differ, and how to read the standard without drowning in it.