In this guide
Use this material to examine your own work. Confirm current requirements, forms and dates with ICE before applying.
ICE states that security restrictions should not reduce the quality of your report. Engineers working on sensitive infrastructure can qualify while protecting the details they are unable to disclose.
Keeping the evidence while removing the detail
The instinct when work is restricted is to write less. That is the wrong instinct, and it produces reports that fail for lack of evidence rather than for disclosure.
What reviewers need is your reasoning, not the identity of the asset. Almost everything that makes evidence strong survives anonymisation:
- The engineering problem, stated generically.
- The options you considered and the basis for choosing.
- The calculation you ran and the assumption that mattered.
- The consequence, and what you learned.
What has to go is the identifying detail: where it was, what it protects, what it is vulnerable to, and dimensions or configurations that would let someone reconstruct it.
A useful discipline: write the paragraph in full, then remove the identifiers and read it again. If it still shows what you decided and why, it is fine. If removing the identifiers empties it, the paragraph was describing the asset rather than your work, which was a weakness even before security came into it.
The same evidence, cleared
Fictional example: a restricted site, structural engineer
Before clearance: I assessed the 450 mm reinforced concrete blast wall to Building 14 at the [named] site, which protects the primary control room, and found it deficient against the specified threat.
After clearance: I assessed an existing reinforced concrete protective wall against a specified dynamic loading and found it did not meet the required performance. I had to decide between a strengthening scheme and a change to the operational arrangement behind it. I recommended strengthening because the operational change transferred the risk rather than reducing it, and I set out the residual performance for the client to accept.
The second version has no site, no building, no dimension and no stated function, and it is better evidence, because it is about a judgement rather than about a wall. Note that the anonymised version also happens to be the version that would be stronger in any report.
Before anything leaves your employer
Talking about it on the day
Two practical points. First, if there are restrictions on what you can discuss, ICE needs to know at application, as an individual requirement: not at the review. Second, prepare how you will decline. "I can describe the engineering but not the location" is a professional answer, and reviewers deal with it regularly. Being unable to say anything at all about your principal project is a different problem, and one to solve before you apply.
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.