In this guide
Use this material to examine your own work. Confirm current requirements, forms and dates with ICE before applying.
The report provides the main evidence for your application. It is pre-assessed before review and supplies the basis for your presentation and most interview questions.
Narrative, not attribute-by-attribute
This is the instruction candidates most often ignore, usually because a chapter per attribute feels safer. It is not, for two reasons.
The first is that it reads badly. Seven chapters, each opening with a project introduction because the reader has been moved somewhere new, wastes hundreds of words on context.
The second is that it evidences less. Real engineering decisions carry several attributes at once: a decision about a temporary works sequence is technical, commercial, safety-related and often a leadership act as well. Split across seven chapters, each appears once, thinly. Told as one account, it does all four jobs in the same three hundred words.
The way to satisfy yourself that coverage is complete is to audit against the attributes after writing, not to structure around them. That is what the evidence matrix is for.
A workable order
- 01
Choose your one or two principal projects
Choose for the decisions you made, not for the size of the scheme. A project you led a small part of, badly documented, is worse evidence than a modest job you owned.
- 02
List the decisions before you write prose
Twelve to twenty of them, each one sentence. This is the skeleton, and it is much easier to see gaps here than in a draft.
- 03
Map them against the seven areas
Now you can see which areas are carried by your principal projects and which need something from elsewhere in your career.
- 04
Write the account, not the project
Context in one paragraph, then decisions. If a paragraph has no decision in it, ask what it is for.
- 05
Cut to the limit, ruthlessly
First drafts are routinely 7,000 words. What goes is almost always background: reviewers do not need the scheme's history, the client's objectives, or the site's geology in detail.
- 06
Add the appendices and the hyperlinks
Link from the text to the appendix and back again. Then check every link works in the combined PDF, which is not the same as in your word processor.
- 07
Give it to your lead sponsor early
They have a duty to give constructive criticism. Two days before the deadline is not constructive criticism, it is proofreading.
Editing for a reviewer
Look for
- Replace 'we' with 'I' wherever you mean I: then check the remaining 'we' really is a team action.
- Put the decision in the first sentence of the paragraph, and the reasoning after it.
- Keep one tense and one voice. Drifting between them is the commonest readability problem.
- Make every appendix reference specific: which appendix, and what to look at in it.
- Read it aloud. Sentences you cannot say are sentences a reviewer will not follow.
- Check consistency with your CV, and with what your sponsors are likely to write.
Watch for
- Spend a page on the scheme's background. It is not evidence and it is a fifth of a project section.
- Use acronyms without a list, or use a list as an excuse for forty of them.
- Quote your job description.
- Write anything you would not want to be asked about for ten minutes.
- Include confidential or security-sensitive material without clearance. See security-sensitive work.
- Copy anything. Samples of reports are put through plagiarism detection software.
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.