Retrospectively collated IPD

Where a mentor or a training scheme was not available to you, this route lets you complete the required documents from experience you already have, up to the point of application.

What is genuinely harder

Two things, and it is worth naming them plainly rather than pretending the routes are equivalent in effort.

Recall. You are writing final report forms about work you may have done five years ago. The specifics that make evidence convincing — why you chose the option you chose, what the check gave you, what you would do differently — fade fast. Budget real time for going back through drawings, calculation files and old correspondence before you write anything.

Nobody is telling you what is thin. On the individually managed route a mentor says "your commercial evidence is weak" two years before it matters. Here, you have to find that yourself. The gap analysis and an honest read of each Core Objective page are doing the job a mentor would otherwise do.

Get a Chartered Member to help anyway

The guidance is explicit that one can assist without signing anything. Take that up. What you want from them is not a signature — it is somebody experienced reading your draft forms and telling you where a reviewer will push.

Ask them the question a mentor would ask: which of these ten objectives would you struggle to defend on my behalf?

Where to start

Not with the forms. With the projects.

List the significant work you have done, in order. For each, write down what you were responsible for and what you decided. Only then map it onto the ten objectives — because working the other way round, objective by objective, produces evidence bent to fit the box.