Our post today is written by Peter Hallsworth, CEng FICE. Contributor for The Civil Engineering Exam

Peter is a Member of the Institution Council and serves on several panels including the Professional Reviews Panel and the Fellowship Panel.

Peter became a Chartered Engineer in 1975 and undertook his first Professional Review in 1982. Since then he has undertaken just shy of 500 reviews of all kinds from Technician through to Fellow. He has been also running a Written Exercise Group based in Manchester and online for ten years, with several participants winning prizes every year.

The difference with Indian Reviews

Reviews in India tend to be slightly different from those in the UK.

The traditional route into a Civil Engineering career in India tends to be by joining a company as a draughtsman then working your way up. This is normally straight from school and they learn on-the-job, meaning my cohort of candidates started at Engineering Technician level.

The EngTech review is a short 45 minute exercise, starting with a five minute presentation and continuing with questions against the five attributes (Knowledge of Engineering, Application of Engineering, Management, Commercial and Professional Commitment).

Career and training

Many Indian candidates work for global organisations from places as diverse as Glossop, Derbyshire to Anaheim, California or the Northern Territories of Australia. They have a lot of different design codes to learn, as well as communication challenges to integrate their element of design into exactly what the client wants.

At the other end of the scale I had several Technical Report Route candidates. These engineers have been through the training process and have collected a BEng degree and an IEng MICE professional qualification on the way.

Now they are working towards CEng MICE so they will have to demonstrate Masters degree-level engineering knowledge which they gain on-the-job. They also have to submit a Technical Report looking at a specific piece of work in engineering detail.

The Lotus Temple

On my sight-seeing I came across a good example of the sort of technical report project: the Lotus Temple in Delhi. It was built in 1986 by Larsen and Toubro, a major civil company in India, and follows the concept of a lotus flower.

The petals are high quality concrete covered in white marble. That gives the same visual quality as the Taj Mahal down the road in Agra. Clearly, temporary works would have been a challenge with curved formwork and an exposed aggregate finish inside. Also, getting the marble cladding in place would have been a major exercise. As it happens, a couple of my candidates were from Larsen and Toubro but neither talked about the Lotus Temple.

Good luck!

By the end of the week of reviews we had interviewed 35 candidates. They will find out their results at the same time as the Spring UK results are published, on Friday 2nd June 2017. I wish good luck to all the candidates!