In this guide
Use this material to examine your own work. Confirm current requirements, forms and dates with ICE before applying.
Read ICE's requirement on the attribute page, then use the examples and self-assessment to examine evidence from your own work.
Questions for checking your evidence
Use these prompts to review management and leadership in your own work. They are preparation advice; the official attribute statements define the requirements.
- How did you plan and organise work beyond your own tasks?
- What direction or support did you give the team?
- How did you help another person develop?
- How did you handle a disputed decision and its consequences?
- What did you improve in the quality of the work?
Discuss any point you cannot yet explain with your mentor and identify the experience or record needed.
Participation, contribution, responsibility
| Situation | How it reads in this area |
|---|---|
| Participation | “I worked in a team of six engineers delivering a highways framework.” |
| Contribution | “I proposed a change to how we allocated checkers, and the team adopted it.” |
| Responsibility | “Two errors reached the client in three months. I proposed named checkers with the time priced into the fee, got the 4% fee impact agreed with our associate, ran it on one job to convince the two people who thought it was bureaucratic, and we have used it for two years.” |
Illustrative and fictional. The most useful thing you can do with your own draft is read it paragraph by paragraph and decide which of the three each one evidences. Participation is worth very little on its own.
Describing activity, and demonstrating competence
Fictional: management and leadership
I managed a team of six engineers, allocating work according to programme priorities, chairing weekly progress meetings and reporting on resource utilisation to the framework manager.
One of my engineers was consistently late on drainage packages and I had assumed it was workload. When I sat with him it was that he did not trust his own hydraulic calculations and was re-running them. I paired him with the person who had trained me for two jobs, and set the expectation that he would present his assumptions rather than his answers. He now leads the drainage packages.
The first is the job description. The second is management and leadership in one incident: a symptom investigated rather than assumed, an intervention chosen for the actual cause, and a result in somebody else.
What changes with the grade
At Incorporated level. Plan and organise work and resources, manage teams or technical specialisms, and assist others to meet changing needs. Evidence one occasion where your planning changed what happened.
At Chartered level. ICE asks CEng candidates specifically to describe how they took a lead in some or all elements of a project. Leading includes setting the direction others then worked to: it is not confined to managing people, and a technical lead who set the assumptions a team designed against is leading.
How evidence in this area usually fails to land
Describing the project instead of yourself
The submission reads as a project description. Scope, value, programme and technical detail are all present; the candidate appears only as a narrator.
How it sounds out loud. The candidate answers 'tell me about your role' by describing the scheme, and keeps describing it. Reviewers interrupt, which unsettles candidates who expected to give a prepared overview.
The repair. Cut the project description to the minimum a reader needs to understand the problem you faced.
Count the sentences before the first 'I' that is followed by a decision.
'We' everywhere
An account written entirely as 'we' can leave your contribution unclear, particularly when describing decisions. In spoken practice, listen for whether the answer identifies what you did. Keep 'we' for joint work and explain your own part accurately.
Search the draft for 'we'. At each one, could a reader still tell what you did?
The job-description answer
Duties listed as responsibilities. It reads like a role specification, in the present tense of a permanent state rather than the past tense of things that happened.
How it sounds out loud. Recognisable by its tense and rhythm: 'I was responsible for managing the site team, liaising with the client, and ensuring compliance with…'. It sounds like a CV read aloud.
The repair. Convert each duty into one occasion where you discharged it and something turned on it.
Does this describe what you were employed to do, or what you did?
Reflection as a formality
A closing paragraph of learning that is generic, positive and disconnected from anything specific: most often 'I learned the importance of early stakeholder engagement'.
How it sounds out loud. Delivered with a slight change of tone, because it is the bit the candidate wrote last and believes is required rather than useful.
The repair. Replace 'I learned the importance of X' with the concrete thing you now do differently.
Would the reflection be true of any engineer, on any project?
Everything rests on one project
One project (usually the largest or most recent) asked to evidence all seven areas, so several areas are covered by whatever that project happened to contain.
How it sounds out loud. Every answer returns to the same scheme. Reviewers eventually ask for something else, and the candidate who has prepared only one project has nothing in reserve.
The repair. Map examples against areas and find the ones resting on a single instance.
How many of the seven areas are evidenced from the same job?
Management described as leadership
Programme administration, resource allocation and progress reporting offered as evidence of leadership. They are evidence of management, which is a real and assessed thing, but the two are being conflated.
How it sounds out loud. The candidate describes systems and processes fluently and struggles when asked about persuading anyone of anything.
The repair. Find an occasion where you took people somewhere they were not already going.
Did you administer the work, or change its direction?
Compliance offered as competence
Evidence built around having complied (with procedures, standards, method statements, quality systems) rather than around what the candidate decided.
How it sounds out loud. Safe, procedural answers that never quite reach a decision. Reviewers tend to push harder, which candidates can experience as hostility when it is a search for the evidence.
The repair. Find where the procedure ran out, was wrong, or did not fit, and write about that.
Does the sentence say you followed something, or that you judged something?
Polished prose with nothing underneath
A submission that has been through several drafts of language while the underlying evidence has not changed. It reads professionally and contains no decisions.
How it sounds out loud. The gap between the quality of the document and the quality of the answers is itself a signal, and an uncomfortable one.
The repair. Before editing, audit: mark every paragraph as participation, contribution or decision. If most are not decisions, editing is the wrong task.
Has the writing been improved, or the evidence?
The mistake that is being managed rather than owned
A failure is described, but with the responsibility distributed elsewhere: to the client's late information, the contractor's workmanship, the programme, the previous engineer.
How it sounds out loud. The tell is a 'but' or a 'to be fair' arriving quickly after the admission, followed by context that steadily removes the candidate from the event.
The repair. State your own part first, plainly, without context.
Does the account contain a mistake, or a mistake with an explanation attached?
An answer that fits several attributes and proves none
A broad account touching engineering, management, commercial and safety aspects at once, at a level of detail too shallow for any of them to be evidenced.
How it sounds out loud. The answer wanders. It sounds comprehensive and leaves the reviewer unsure what was just demonstrated, so they ask a narrowing question the candidate has not prepared.
The repair. Decide what each example is primarily for, and write it for that.
If you had to file this example under exactly one area, could you?
Questions to ask yourself
- You have described the design. What part of it was yours?
Am I reading about this candidate, or about their project?
- Who would have made that decision if you had been on leave that week?
Am I reading about this candidate, or about their project?
- What could you approve without asking anyone?
Was this person accountable for something, or near something?
- What was the largest decision you took alone?
Was this person accountable for something, or near something?
- 'Involved in': tell me what you did.
Did they take part, add something, or decide?
- What did you contribute that nobody else did?
Did they take part, add something, or decide?
- You have said 'we' four times in that answer. Which part was yours?
Is 'we' being used naturally, or to hide who did what?
- How many people were in that 'we'?
Is 'we' being used naturally, or to hide who did what?
- What else did you consider?
Was there a real choice, and did they make it?
- Why did you reject that?
Was there a real choice, and did they make it?
- What was the biggest risk you were carrying?
Do they know what they did not know?
- What did you not know when you made that decision?
Do they know what they did not know?
- What happened in the end?
What happened, and did it matter?
- How do you know it saved that much?
What happened, and did it matter?
- What would you do differently?
Have they learned anything, and can they say so without flinching?
- What is the biggest mistake you have made professionally?
Have they learned anything, and can they say so without flinching?
- Give me another example of that, from a different project.
Is this how they work, or the one time it happened?
- Is that how you normally approach it, or was that occasion unusual?
Is this how they work, or the one time it happened?
- What are you working on at the moment?
Is this current, and is it at the level being applied for?
- That was five years ago. What have you done since that is comparable?
Is this current, and is it at the level being applied for?
- How long had you been qualified when you did that?
Does this add up?
- That is a large saving on a scheme that size. How was it calculated?
Does this add up?
Where honest improvement stops
Alternatives and rejected options
Describe the alternatives you considered and why you rejected them. If there was no choice, say so and demonstrate judgement through another part of the work.
Honest reflection
Do not manufacture a photogenic mistake, and do not confess to something that was not your responsibility in order to look reflective. Both read as performance. A small, true, specific lesson beats a large invented one every time.
Outcome, and why it mattered
Never invent or inflate a figure. An unsupported number is the easiest thing in a submission to test and the hardest to recover from, because it puts every other number you have written in doubt. If you no longer have the data, say what you can substantiate.
Participation, contribution, or decision
Describe participation accurately. If you did not make the decision, explain your contribution and what you learned, or choose another example to demonstrate responsibility.
Meaningful personal responsibility
State your authority accurately. Where your responsibility was narrow, explain the depth of the work within it. Sponsors countersign the account, and reviewers can question it.
Proportionate and credible
This signal is where exaggeration is caught, so it is where the temptation must be resisted hardest. An accurate account of a modest role is assessable. An inflated account of a large one, once doubted, contaminates everything else.
A self-assessment you can fail
These are not things to tick because they sound right. Answer each one out loud. Anything you cannot answer is either a writing problem or a development gap, and those need completely different responses.
Official sources
Selected publisher pages were rechecked in September 2026. Other source records were last checked in July 2026. Open the latest official document before relying on a requirement.