In this guide
Use this material to examine your own work. Confirm current requirements, forms and dates with ICE before applying.
Use your fifteen-minute presentation to expand on an aspect of your report. ICE's instruction rules out summarising the report or your CV, a common problem in first drafts.
Expand, do not summarise
Your reviewers have read the report. Use the presentation to examine a decision or technical problem in greater depth.
Choose one subject that has enough depth for discussion. Take one decision from your report, or one technical problem, and give it the space the report could not. Show the analysis. Show the option you rejected and what it would have cost. Show the drawing you could only reference. Show what went wrong and what you did.
A useful test: if a reviewer could have got everything in your presentation from reading the report, choose a different subject.
Choosing the subject
The best subjects have four properties:
- You made a decision in it. Explain a decision you made and the reasoning behind it.
- It has depth you had to leave out. If the report covered it fully, there is nothing to expand.
- You can be questioned on it happily. Whatever you present, you will be asked about, so present your strongest material, not the material you feel you ought to cover.
- It is visual. Something with a drawing, a model, a photograph or a graph in it is far easier to hold attention with for fifteen minutes.
It does not need to cover all the attributes. ICE says so specifically. Trying to touch all seven in fifteen minutes produces a shallow presentation and wastes the one part of the day you fully control.
Delivering it
Look for
- Rehearse to time, out loud, standing or sitting as you will on the day. Reading it silently always underestimates.
- Build in a minute of slack. Nerves speed most people up and slow a few down.
- Start with the problem, not with your job title.
- Use visual aids that do work: a drawing you can point at beats a bulleted list of what you are saying.
- Prepare for the questions your own presentation invites. If you show a graph, expect to be asked about the assumptions behind it.
- Have a version that survives the technology failing: know your material well enough to talk without slides.
Watch for
- Summarise the report. They have read it.
- Walk through your CV.
- Try to cover all seven attribute areas.
- Fill slides with text and then read them.
- Use an animation-heavy deck. It adds risk and no information.
- Run over. Reviewers may stop you, and the time comes out of your interview.
Two presentation subjects from the same report
Fictional example: a candidate whose report covers a pumping station and a culvert renewal
'My Professional Review' — an overview of my career, my role at Northgate, the pumping station project, the culvert project, and how they demonstrate the seven attributes.
'Choosing between rehabilitation and replacement on the Eastgate culvert' — the condition evidence, the three options, the whole-life and carbon comparison, why the middle option won, the assumption it turned on, and what I would check differently next time.
The second has a question in it, so it has somewhere to go. It will also produce far better interview questions, because it invites reviewers into the candidate's strongest material rather than inviting them to find the weakest.
Presentation checklist
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.