The two-page experience report

Two pages covering your roles and responsibilities over the course of your career — submitted at application, alongside the ten IPD final report forms, as a single document.

What it is for

The report forms answer "how have you met this objective?" ten times. The experience report answers the question that comes before all of them: "who is this engineer, and what have they been responsible for?"

It is the first thing your reviewers read about you, and it sets the frame for everything else. It is also the document that lets them see the shape of a career — the progression from supervised work to independent judgement that the standards are built around.

Two pages goes quickly

At a readable font size, two pages is roughly 900 to 1,100 words. Spent on prose about your employers, that is nothing. Spent well, it is enough.

A structure that works:

1. 01A short opening — where you trained, where you are now, and the kind of structural engineering you do. Three or four lines.
2. 02Roles in sequence, most space to the most recent and most responsible. For each: the period, your actual role, the scale and type of work, and what you were responsible for — not what the office did.
3. 03A closing paragraph on the level you now work at: what you decide, what you check, whom you advise.

The single most useful edit

Go through it and delete every sentence whose subject is your employer. Reviewers are not interested in what your company does; they are interested in what you have done. That advice is given directly about the report forms, and it applies just as sharply here, where space is scarcest.

Then check the verbs. "Was involved in", "assisted with" and "was part of the team that" are all ways of not saying what you did. If you sized it, say you sized it. If you checked it, say you checked it. If you led it, say so.