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 sustainability in your own work. They are preparation advice; the official attribute statements define the requirements.
- Which decision changed because of sustainability?
- How did you consider the whole life of the asset?
- What trade-off did you make and what did it cost?
- What impacts beyond carbon did you consider?
- How did you test a sustainability claim?
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 | “Sustainability was considered throughout the project and I completed the carbon assessment.” |
| Contribution | “My carbon assessment showed the recycled option was about 45% lower, which fed into the option selection.” |
| Responsibility | “I proposed in-situ cold recycling, then went to two neighbouring authorities for their condition survey data rather than their opinions, found one early failure, established it was a known limitation on poor foundation, and specified the method only on lengths where our coring showed sound foundation.” |
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: sustainable development
The design incorporated sustainable materials and I completed the carbon assessment for the scheme, which demonstrated a reduction against the baseline option.
The obvious case for the recycled pavement was embodied carbon. What I was less comfortable with was that a saving at construction which buys you an earlier intervention is not a saving. I could not find durability data for our traffic loading, so I asked two authorities for their condition surveys. The recycled lengths are now in year four and show no difference from the conventional section.
The first reports a deliverable. The second contains the question the candidate asked themselves, the fact that the answer was not available, what they did to get it, and evidence four years on. The engineering is the same; the judgement is visible only in the second.
What changes with the grade
At Incorporated level. Understand and comply with relevant codes of conduct, and manage work within the framework of sustainable development: evidenced by a decision of yours that changed.
At Chartered level. The same, with influence over what the framework is rather than only working inside it, and with the whole-lifecycle view ICE's UNSDG framing asks for applied to decisions rather than reported after them.
How evidence in this area usually fails to land
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?
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 made that difficult?
Did this require professional judgement, or just care and effort?
- Why could you not simply follow the standard detail?
Did this require professional judgement, or just care and effort?
- Why that value?
Do they know why that was done, or only that it was?
- What is that clause protecting against?
Do they know why that was done, or only that it was?
- 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 happened in the end?
What happened, and did it matter?
- How do you know it saved that much?
What happened, and did it matter?
- 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?
- Tell me about a time you had to raise something uncomfortable.
Is this understood, or recited?
- What did that cost you?
Is this understood, or recited?
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.
Was the problem demanding enough?
Describe the difficulty accurately. If the example gives little evidence of the required competence, choose another or seek further experience before applying.
Ethics, safety, sustainability and the public interest
Use an ethical example from your own experience. Ordinary actions such as checking, declining, escalating or correcting can demonstrate professional conduct without a dramatic dilemma.
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.
Repeatable competence, not one good day
If you have only one relevant instance, record it once and consider whether more experience is needed. Rephrasing the same event does not provide additional evidence.
Whose competence is this?
Do not promote yourself into someone else's decision to fill a gap. If the call was your team leader's, say so and describe the part you did own: the analysis you produced that informed it, the risk you raised. That is real evidence. An inflated claim is one follow-up question from collapse, and the collapse costs more than the gap would have.
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.