In this guide
Use this material to examine your own work. Confirm current requirements, forms and dates with IStructE before applying.
Describe your career roles and responsibilities in a two-page experience report. Submit it at application in one document with the ten IPD final report forms.
Purpose of the route
The report forms answer *"how have you met this objective?"* ten times. The experience report answers the question that comes before all of them: *"who is this engineer, and what have they been responsible for?"*
It is the first thing your reviewers read about you, and it sets the frame for everything else. It is also the document that lets them see the shape of a career: the progression from supervised work to independent judgement that the standards are built around.
Two pages goes quickly
At a readable font size, two pages is roughly 900 to 1,100 words. Spent on prose about your employers, that is nothing. Spent well, it is enough.
A structure that works:
- A short opening: where you trained, where you are now, and the kind of structural engineering you do. Three or four lines.
- Roles in sequence, most space to the most recent and most responsible. For each: the period, your actual role, the scale and type of work, and what you were responsible for: not what the office did.
- A closing paragraph on the level you now work at: what you decide, what you check, whom you advise.
Check your contribution
Go through it and delete every sentence whose subject is your employer. Reviewers are not interested in what your company does; they are interested in what you have done. That advice is given directly about the report forms, and it applies just as sharply here, where space is scarcest.
Then check the verbs. "Was involved in", "assisted with" and "was part of the team that" are all ways of not saying what you did. If you sized it, say you sized it. If you checked it, say you checked it. If you led it, say so.
The same three years, two ways
Fictional example: consultant, education and healthcare projects
"2021–2024: Structural engineer at a multidisciplinary consultancy delivering a wide range of education and healthcare projects across the region. The team was responsible for full structural design services from concept through to completion, working closely with architects and contractors."
"2021–2024: Structural engineer, education and healthcare. Ran the structural design of two primary schools (£4m and £7m), from concept to construction, reporting to a principal engineer on stage-gate reviews only. Sized and detailed the steel and RC frames, chaired the fortnightly design-team meeting, and checked the graduate engineer's work on both jobs from 2023."
The second version is barely longer and says what the candidate was responsible for, at what scale, with what supervision, and where they advised others. The first could describe anyone in that office.
Writing it
Look for
- Give the most space to the most recent and most responsible work
- Name the scale (value, size, storeys, span) so the level is legible
- Say explicitly where you worked unsupervised and where you checked others
- Include pre-graduate experience where it is relevant
- Keep it consistent with the ten forms and the portfolio; contradictions get probed
Watch for
- Describe your employer's capabilities
- Run to three pages and hope
- List every project you touched
- Use 'we' where you mean 'I'
- Repeat, in full, material that belongs in the report forms
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.