Phase 3 · Complete your IPD
Quarterly reports and the development diary
The records the individually managed route requires, and how to keep them so they are useful later.
Who this is for:Candidates at any stage ·Mentors
On the individually managed route the Institution provides IPD quarterly report forms for recording progress towards each Core Objective. They go to your reviewers, not to the Institution.
What is required
Institution of Structural Engineers
- You must keep records of your training and experience to indicate progress towards each Core Objective. The Institution provides quarterly report forms and progress summary records for the purpose.
- A personal development diary, updated weekly, covering all activities relating to IPD, makes completing the quarterly reports easier.
- Quarterly report forms and progress summary records are submitted directly to your reviewers when requested — not to the Institution.
- They do not count towards the portfolio page limit.
- Supporting documents outside the page count
- Quarterly reports, progress summary, signed training recordsSent directly to your reviewers, not to the Institution, and they do not count towards the 300 pages.
From IPD Guidance — Chartered Member, Institution of Structural Engineers.
Write them for the person you will be in four years
That person is assembling ten final report forms and a 300-page portfolio, and has forgotten almost everything about the project you are on this week.
What they will need from each quarter is not a list of jobs. It is:
- what you were responsible for,
- what you decided, and what you rejected,
- what went wrong, and what you did,
- which objectives it speaks to, and at what level.
A quarterly report containing those four things is a draft of your final report forms. One containing a project summary is a record that you were employed.
The download comes from IStructE
Use the Institution's current forms, from its website. Queensferry does not reproduce them and no planning template here is a substitute — what is offered instead is guidance on what to put in them.
Filling them in
Worth doing
- Write in the first person, about your own work.
- Name the Core Objectives each entry supports.
- Use the language of the standard: knowledge, experience or ability, matched to what the objective is set at.
- Include the specifics — the member size, the option rejected, the number that surprised you.
- Record the things that went wrong. They are the most useful entries you will ever write.
- Get your mentor's comments recorded while the quarter is fresh.
Avoid
- Describe what your company does. Reviewers are only interested in what you did.
- Write 'we' where you mean 'I'.
- Save them all up and write four at once from memory.
- Repeat the same evidence quarter after quarter because one project ran for two years.
- Include confidential material without checking what may leave your employer.
Keeping the records useful
8 items · saved in this browser only
Related pages and tools
- Individually managedManaging your own training with a personal mentor: the records, the meetings, and the forms at the end.
- Progress summaryThe rolling view of where you stand against all ten objectives, and how to use it rather than file it.
- MentorWho can mentor you, what to expect of them, and what a mentor should and should not do.
- Final report formsOne form per Core Objective, and the three words IStructE uses for how to write them: personal, positive, practical.
- ConfidentialityRedacting what an NDA covers while keeping the engineering that evidences the objective — and knowing when to leave a project out.