Writing a great report for professional review with the Institution of Civil Engineers#

Opinions of one ICE reviewer

How important is the report?#

Ultimately the decision to admit you as a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) comes down to the judgement of the two reviewers assigned to you.

They need to make a decision based on if they are satisfied you have the attributes the ICE expects of a member at the level they you’re applying for.

That judgement has to be made on the basis of:

your report (read 3 times taking notes, approximately 3 - 4 hours)
your presentation on the review day (15 minutes)
the interview on the review day (45 minutes - 60 minutes)
the written assignment on the review day (20 minutes to read)

As you can see from the approximate timings above the reviewers spend much more time going over the report than they spend with you on the day. The reviewers normally decide whether you pass or fail in the minutes after the interview is over (yes, before the written assignment).

The interview is the centrepiece of the process, but a great report will generally set you up for a great review. If the report gives all the evidence the reviewers need, all they really need to do is ask questions to satisfy themselves you really did what you said or that the report wasn’t written by someone else. On the other hand if the report doesn’t prove you have the attributes then the reviewers will have a barrage of questions they’ll need good answers to in the interview. Worse, if the report contains things that make the reviewers concerned, they’ll have some awkward and searching questions to ask.

Are you ready?#

Before gearing up for the review this is a really important question to figure out. It’s a lot of work to get ready for an ICE review, even doing less preparation than is needed to pass can still be a lot of work so it is really important to ask honestly as the candidate, mentor/delegated engineer (DE), supervising civil engineer (SCE) and/or other sponsor:

Ask yourself: “is now the right time”?

Attempting and failing a professional review is not much fun, it’s much better to wait until you stand a really good chance of success.

The report should be about how you demonstrate the attributes#

This is key. It is very common for large parts of professional reports to be about:

the project
company processes
software (BIM)
background information

Instead it should be about:

the candidate’s contributions to the project
how the candidate used company processes to ensure things were done properly and what they did when those processes weren’t a good fit for the task in hand
how the candidate made good use of software and other methods, choosing what is appropriate

Tip: know the attributes

Understanding and practical application of engineering
Management and leadership
Commercial ability
Health, safety and welfare
Sustainable development
Interpersonal skills and communication
Professional commitment

If you don’t know the attributes really well, you won’t do a good job proving you have them. Reviewers generally don’t appreciate being told explicitly what attributes you’re trying to prove but using some of the same vocabulary and phrases the ICE use in describing the attributes when describing what you’ve done can really help.

Engineers in their day to day role focus on problems (this is a good thing so please keep doing it on the job). But your final report should be about you so don’t talk about other people’s contributions, focus on your own contributions. Use the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ frequently. Problems on your project are only worth including if you solved them, or played an important part in doing so.

Every part of the report should be about proving you have the attributes. If a paragraph or even a sentence doesn’t do this, replace it with one that does. Plan your report before sitting down to write it to ensure you’re covering all seven attributes in what you’re planning to include.

Please note that you probably don’t need to give much space in the report to cover attribute 6 (Interpersonal skills and communication) because the reviewers will be able to assess this directly themselves through the quality of your report, presentation, interview and written assignment.

Background information is much less important than you might think#

Only give as much background information as is needed to make your report comprehensible.

This is probably less than you think.

The most refreshing report I have read as a reviewer dispensed entirely with an introductory section on the company, the client, the contract etc. It started with a description of the part the candidate played in a meeting with the client in the very first paragraph and concentrated throughout the report on what the candidate themself did. Very few wasted words in that report.

Tip: Put as much background as you can into figures and tables that don’t count as part of your word count.

Think of a film that cuts straight to the action. People are intuitive. Yes, some background is needed, but cut it down to the bare minimum.

The presentation#

The presentation shouldn’t duplicate too much of what is in your report. When planning your report think about what you’d most like to cover in your presentation so you don’t:

waste time writing it into your report only to have to take it out, or
have to think of some less interesting thing to cover in your presentation because you only write your presentation after you’ve submitted the report and you’ve used your best material.

It shows you have prepared well if your report introduces, but doesn’t go into detail about what you are planning to cover in your presentation. Saying something like “I will cover how I solved this problem in more detail in my presentation”.

How to talk about your contributions#

The reviewers will want to get a feel for how you work. When you’re writing, include:

How you identified and understood a problem.
How you investigated solutions to it.
What your biggest concerns were.
Who you sought advice from.
How you judged between opposing viewpoints.
How you settled on a solution.
How you persuaded others that the solution was the best one.
How you modified your view in the light of new evidence or someone with more experience giving advice.
An appraisal of what you did, (would you do the same again? What could you do better?)

Avoid these blunders#

Unchecked work
Hazards on site photos
Presenting other’s work as you own
Exaggerating your contribution
Flawed designs and incorrect calcs
Misinterpreting what the ICE means by ‘Independent Judgement’ (it isn’t making unexamined decisions)

When it comes to points 3 and 4 remember that the reviewers can be expected to assume that you are knowledgeable or even an expert on whatever you decide to write about in the report. After all, it’s completely up to you what you write about. Why wouldn’t you put your best foot forward? If you don’t want detailed questions about something, leave it out. Think about what most interests you about your job, the things people get bored listening to you talk about; that’s what to include.

Some mentors may advise the opposite of this and encourage you to put in more examples of different kinds of technical work you’ve been involved in to make you sound more impressive even if you didn’t have much to do with it. Remember it’ll be you in the interview seat. If it’s in your report, be ready for some detailed questioning about it.

Independent judgement does not mean being so arrogant and/or careless as to make important decisions entirely on your own. A good engineer knows very well how easily anyone can make mistakes and so:

They diligently examine their decisions, designs and calculations to find errors and uncertainties
They subject their ideas, decisions and work to the scrutiny of others
They listen carefully to the criticisms of others and appraise the validity of the arguments, being ready to be proven wrong
They weigh their decision and are ready to justify why they acted as they did (especially if someone disagrees)

Bad example of evidence of independent judgement: The candidate stated that they had selected a roughness value to use in their hydraulic calculations by independent judgement. I asked how sensitive the calculation was to the section of the roughness value, if that value had been verified and if the calculation had been checked with other roughness values. The candidate could not answer these questions to my satisfaction and I concluded the candidate had made a poor judgement.

The CV#

Tip: Don’t just copy paste an old or company CV in, write a new one

Your CV should be as carefully written as everything else. It’s a great opportunity to show the breadth of your experience. Emphasise your contributions just like in the rest of the report. Don’t reduce the font size to include every job you’ve ever done, choose your best projects. Including key lessons and achievements you’re particularly proud of from each scheme on your CV really improves readability and is a great way to demonstrate progression through your career.

The appendices#

Tip: Don’t make them too long

It’s important to be a good communicator in your appendices. Don’t just drop mountains of project documents in there. Edit carefully. Make sure it’s comprehensible on its own.

Good things to include:

High quality calculations that are correct, checked, bespoke, clear, well presented, self-explanatory and logical
Good quality drawings which are buildable
Project programmes
Budgets
Design Risk Assessment
Risk Assessment and Method Statements
Environmental Risk Assessments
Proof of STEM activities
Proof of ICE activities
Community involvement
Papers you’ve written or contributed to
Letters of thanks

Your Continuing professional development (CPD) records#

Follow the ICE’s guidance on writing your CPD.

Some reviewers are also CPD auditors. As of the streamlining in 2022 you only need one year’s worth of CPD so please make the effort to make sure it reads well, and don’t include more, it’s the most boring part for reviewers to read through (unless your reviewer is a CPD auditor, they love it).

Key learning points from your CPD activities are what will make your CPD interesting to read although if the CPD wasn’t good quality you are perfectly entitled to say so and why in the ‘further comments’ section.

Be concise#

Don’t make your reviewer have to hunt to find what’s important. If you pad out your report with needless words it looks like you don’t have much to say. As you write your report, go back over what you’ve written and remove as many words as you can whilst retaining the meaning.

You only have 5000 words, you need to make the most of them. Aim to fit as many stories that illustrate how you have the attributes as you possibly can within the word limit.

>>> waffle = "waffle "
>>> lots_of_waffle = waffle * 200
>>> print(lots_of_waffle)
waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle

A fool multiplies words
King Solomon - Ecclesiastes 10:14

Repetition#

It is distracting to the reader if you use the same word too many times close together. Try to vary the words you use.

Keep sentences short#

Your report will generally read better if you keep your sentences between 15 - 20 words with varied length. Some very short, others longer.

Unless you're Victor Hugo

The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober, serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the regular sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former illegitimate displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of Europe, and, what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and speaking them; an admirable representative of the “middle class,” but outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race, very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his family and his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancour and of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, in countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France, incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family; assuming more domination than authority and more authority than dignity, a disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it preserves politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures, and society from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive, sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise with conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimæras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling, brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking up, and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king; endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive to minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order to judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom, easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory, his only point of resemblance with Cæsar, Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd, the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls, in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord with France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact; governing too much and not enough; his own first minister; excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities an obstacle to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative faculty of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney; in short, a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe, Louis Philippe will be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree as the feeling for what is useful.

Victor Hugo: Les Miserables (opening sentence Chapter III Volume IV)

Vocabulary#

Some obscure words can replace several shorter or more common words so it might be tempting to use them to reduce your word count. However, using an overly complicated vocabulary makes you sound big headed, and for someone who doesn’t know as many words as you, it makes you hard to understand.

You also run the risk of looking silly if you don’t actually know the meaning of the long words you use and use them incorrectly.

Tip: Get a non-engineer to read your report. They should be able to get the gist of it.

If it would sound out of place in conversation, it’s probably out of place in your report.

It’s ok to use more words if they make things clearer. I recommend using the most common place vocabulary you can to make things as clear as possible.

Don’t say “I was responsible for”#

This phrase is used by almost everyone. Please avoid this phrase because you’re probably trying to say something else.

I was responsible for establishing a control network of setting out points to accurately set out structures for the new sewage treatment works.

doesn’t mean the same thing as:

I established a control network of setting out points to accurately set out the structures for the new sewage treatment works.

‘I was made responsible for…’ is even worse. That is making the sentence explicitly about someone else’s choice to put you in that position. It says nothing directly about how well you handled the responsibility.

If you say:

I was responsible for establishing a control network of setting out points to accurately set out structures for the new sewage treatment works.

What happened next?

So that’s what I did
But I got distracted and forgot to do it
I got half way round then a bulldozer ran over the ones I’d already done and I had to start all over again

Don’t list your responsibilities. Tell stories of how well you shouldered your responsibilities.

Use active rather than passive sentences#

Passive sentences sound more boring and bureaucratic. They often need more words to say the same thing. They can be constructed so you don’t know who has done the thing you’re talking about, generally we want to make it clear who has done what.

Active sentences have the ‘doer’ before the ‘thing’.

Passive: The report was submitted on Tuesday afternoon. Or The report was submitted by myself on Tuesday afternoon.

Active: I submitted the report on Tuesday afternoon.

Don’t use nominalisations#

Related to passive sentences. Nominalisation is changing verbs (doing words) into nouns (things). It also makes things sound more boring.

Nominalised: The calculation was subjected to a thoroughgoing verification process, as part of this process it was assigned to a subject matter expert.

Not nomimnalised: I carefully verified the calculation, where I was unsure I got the help of an expert.

Only use acronyms where they make things clearer#

Try not to overload the report with acronyms. Yes, they can reduce your word count but too many are hard to remember and make the report difficult to read. This is especially true of acronyms that are used infrequently and a long time after they are introduced.

Just use the full name if you’re only using it a few times.

General tips#

Write an outline before diving in. I’ve mentioned this before but it can save a lot of time. Writing a rough outline of what you want your report to contain before writing it in full will help you write a well structured report.

Leave gaps between reading it. It can make it easier to spot your mistakes. Over familiarity can lead to reading what you meant to write rather than what you did.

Be ready to re-write sentences and paragraphs from scratch. It’s very easy to make a complete mess by over-editing. If you’re struggling to make a sentence or paragraph flow after a few edits:

Stop editing
Bullet point the points you’re trying to make
Think about the flow of the narrative or argument
Write it again from scratch

Get other people, engineers and non-engineers to read your reports and give feedback. It can be very hard to spot your own mistakes and sections that read badly. Non-subject experts are excellent for finding out if what you’ve written is self explanatory or not.

Word tips#

If you’re not all that good with Word these tips will make your life easier.

Set up styles in the styles menu so you can keep your styles consistent and easily change them any time you want throughout the document.

Use paragraph spacing and page breaks rather than empty paragraphs to get the spacing you want.

Set up an automatic table of contents. Your headings will need to be counted as headings in the style table for this to work. Doing a table of contents manually is a lot of unnecessary work.

Also use automatic captions and references. It’s very easy to end up editing figures and tables in and out and moving them. If you use automatic captions and references the document will update if you change them (or quite visibly error if you remove something that still has a reference to it in the body of the text).

Use rendered mathematical expressions using the equation editor (if you have it). Otherwise use an online equation editor.

Reduce your file size by compressing your photos. They generally look fine even after quite heavy reduction and there is a file size limit you need to keep within.

Use the “in line” option for photos in the layout options. This keeps your photos in the same position in relation to the text rather than in the same position in relation to the page like the “box” option. This makes editing much harder. The only disadvantage of “in line” is that you can’t get text next to the image but the “box” option is a nightmare when you’re making edits.

Make sure your figures are legible. Illegible text is bad, even if it’s not important, but it’s really bad if it is important. However, high resolution images can make file sizes larger. So consider using a vector image (figures drawn in MS applications with their inbuilt drawing tools or .svg) instead of raster (.png, .bmp or .jpeg). Inkscape is a powerfull, free illustrating tool. It takes a little effort to learn but you can create great looking engineering illustrations with it.

Consider replacing construction drawings with diagrams. Engineering drawings are often too detailed to get to look right in a report.

Try hard to keep figures on the same page or as close as possible to the text where they are discussed. It’s easier on the reviewer than having to flick to the appendix and back all the time.

Conclusion#

I hope this article has been useful. They’re my own opinions. It would be great to hear from you if this article has helped or if you think I’m giving any terrible advice to candidates.

If you are gearing up for review, I wish you all the best.