Forum · Professional Development
IStructE Professional Qualification
Guidance for Incorporated and Chartered Structural Engineer candidates — the ten Core Objectives, the portfolio, the Professional Review Interview and the examination.
Independent peer guidance
The path
The phases, in order
Open a phase to see what it involves. Tick pages off as you read them and mark where you are — it will be waiting when you come back.
Choose a phase to see what it involves, in the order it is worth reading.
What you are working towards
A Professional Review in two parts
The Institution’s Professional Review contains an interview and an examination. Both must be satisfied before you are eligible for election to membership, and they test genuinely different things.
The Professional Review Interview looks backwards. Two reviewers read your portfolio and your report forms and question you until they are satisfied you have reached the minimum standard in each of the ten Core Objectives.
The examination looks at what you can do on the day, alone, with a brief you have never seen — read it, produce viable schemes, appraise them, calculate, draw, and set out how it would be built.
You can be strong at one and weak at the other, and passing one tells you nothing about the other. They need separate preparation, over different timescales.
What Queensferry provides
- The ten Core Objectives, explained one by one, for both grades
- What Knowledge, Experience and Ability actually require of you
- All three examination formats, with their marks and their timetables
- 220 practice interview questions and a mock interview
- 77 original examination briefs and 160 timed exercises
- Fifteen tools that keep everything in your own browser
What must come from IStructE
- Whether you are eligible, and for which grade
- Whether your qualifications meet the academic requirement
- Application deadlines, examination dates and fees
- Every official form, and any decision about your application
Start somewhere
Wherever you are in the process
- How it worksThe Professional Review has two parts, and they assess different things.
- Understand MIStructEWhat Chartered Membership requires, and what the title actually depends on.
- Understand IMIStructEA full grade in its own right, and the one place its standards differ.
- The ten Core ObjectivesWhat is assessed, and what Knowledge, Experience and Ability actually mean.
- Moving from IM to CMThe progression route and the supplementary examination.
- Compared with ICEA factual comparison for engineers deciding between them, or doing both.
What is assessed
Ten Core Objectives
Each is set to a minimum standard of Knowledge, Experience or Ability. All ten are assessed at the interview, and it is your responsibility to demonstrate each one. The letters below are the Chartered Member standards.
- 01K · KnowledgeProfessional Standards and Engineering ResponsibilityThat you understand what it means to belong to a profession — the Code of Conduct, the limits of your own competence, the habit of keeping up to date, and some genuine involvement in the Institution beyond paying a subscription.
- 02B · AbilityCommunicationThat you can make yourself understood — in drawings, in writing, and out loud — to engineers and to people who are not engineers. This is the one objective you are assessed on continuously: your portfolio, your report forms, your presentation and the interview itself all feed into it.
- 03B · AbilityConcept Creation and DesignThat you can take a brief and produce a structural solution — choosing a form, setting a grid, deciding how load reaches the ground and how the thing stands up — with safety, carbon, durability, reuse, appearance and cost all in the frame.
- 04B · AbilityAnalysis and SizingThat you understand how structures actually behave, that you choose an analysis suited to the question, and that you know whether to believe the answer.
- 05B · AbilityMaterialsThat you understand the materials you actually build with — how they behave, how they fail, how they are made and placed, how they deteriorate — and that you can specify them properly.
- 06E · ExperienceSustainabilityThat sustainability has changed something you actually did — a quantity, a material, a decision to reuse rather than replace — and that you can talk about the whole life of the structure rather than only its construction.
- 07E · ExperienceConstructionThat you know how what you draw actually gets built — sequence, temporary conditions, tolerance, access, plant — and that you have contributed to that process rather than watched it.
- 08E · ExperienceHealth, Safety and Risk ManagementThat you know the law and the hazards, that you manage risk in your own work rather than delegating it to a form, and that people are safer because of decisions you made.
- 09E · ExperienceManagementThat you can plan and run work — programme, resources, quality, other people — and that you have made the decisions that come with a constraint you could not wish away.
- 10K · KnowledgeCommercial and LegalThat you understand the money and the law around your engineering well enough to make sound decisions inside them — the contract you work under, what it allocates to whom, and what your advice costs.
Deliberately absent
What is deliberately not here
Two things are deliberately absent rather than unfinished, and both are the Institution’s to settle. They are named here rather than quietly left out.
- Route A and Route B of the Technical Report Route, separately — the guidance supplied carries no date, so every limit stays withheld
- Application deadlines, examination dates and fees — these change between sessions and belong to IStructE