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 health, safety and welfare in your own work. They are preparation advice; the official attribute statements define the requirements.
- What hazard did you remove or control?
- How did you discharge your duties as a designer or manager?
- What risk remained for other people?
- Did you stop or refuse work, and what followed?
- How did safety affect the engineering decision?
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 attended site inductions and participated in the HAZOP workshop for the pumping station.” |
| Contribution | “I raised the wet well access arrangement at the HAZOP.” |
| Responsibility | “I identified that the instrument location made a routine six-monthly calibration into a confined space entry — around 60 entries over a 30-year life — proposed a davit-mounted alternative, made the whole-life argument when the project manager pushed back on the four days it added to my programme, and the layout changed.” |
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: health, safety and welfare
All works were carried out in accordance with the approved method statement and risk assessment, with daily briefings and regular site safety inspections undertaken throughout.
The method statement had the precast units landed from the eastern verge. Walking it before the lift I realised the overhead line was 4.2 m from the slew radius at full extension, not the 6 m the plan assumed, because the drawing predated a pole relocation. I stopped the lift, we got the line isolated for a night possession, and the units went in two days later. I now check overhead services on site against the drawing rather than from it.
The first says the system was followed. The second describes noticing something the system had not caught, acting on it at real cost, and changing how the candidate works. That is what discharging a duty looks like.
What changes with the grade
At Incorporated level. Sound knowledge of legislation, hazards and safe systems of work; manage risks and manage health, safety and welfare within your own area of responsibility.
At Chartered level. The same, with responsibility extending beyond your own area, and with a contribution to improving how the organisation handles it rather than only complying with how it does.
How evidence in this area usually fails to land
Standards listed, judgement absent
Codes, standards and procedures named as evidence of competence, without any account of how they were applied or what they required the candidate to decide.
How it sounds out loud. Produces the most uncomfortable follow-ups in the interview, because a candidate who has quoted a clause is fairly asked what it is for. Reviewers are rarely trying to catch anyone out; they are checking that the citation was understood.
The repair. For each standard named, add the sentence explaining why it governed this case.
Does the standard appear as a name, or as something you had to apply?
Borrowed responsibility
An account may attribute a team’s or senior colleague’s decision to the candidate. Ask who owned the decision and what the candidate contributed. Record the analysis, option or risk they were responsible for, with the limits of their authority.
Would your sponsor, reading this sentence, recognise it as yours?
Thin ethical evidence
Professional commitment evidenced by describing the Code of Professional Conduct, membership activity and good intentions, with no occasion on which anything was at stake.
How it sounds out loud. The candidate becomes noticeably more abstract, and often longer-winded, because there is no incident to anchor the answer.
The repair. Look for the ordinary occasions rather than the dramatic ones: declining to sign, raising a defect, correcting an optimistic claim, telling a client something unwelcome.
Is there an occasion in it, or only an intention?
Attendance offered as contribution
Being present at meetings, reviews, workshops or site visits described as though presence were participation, and participation were contribution.
How it sounds out loud. 'I attended the design team meetings': usually offered when a candidate is short of material for an area.
The repair. Find the one meeting where you said something that changed the outcome, and write about that meeting.
Look for verbs of presence: attended, joined, sat on, was part of.
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?
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?
- 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 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 was the actual figure?
Could I check any of this?
- Which drawing was that?
Could I check any of this?
- 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
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.
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.
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.
Risk, uncertainty and the limits of knowledge
Do not claim to have foreseen a risk you only understood afterwards. Hindsight presented as foresight is transparent and damaging. 'We did not see that coming; here is what we changed as a result' is honest, and it evidences learning.
Specific, and supported
Do not add specifics you cannot stand behind, and do not put confidential client information into a submission to make it more concrete. Check what your employer permits before you write. Invented detail is both dishonest and unnecessary: real work always contains real particulars.
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.