Often it is difficult to see how the ICE is working from an outsider's perspective. It can seem like they can be stagnant for years in one area but lightning quick in others.

However, we picked up on an ICE job opening for a “Professional Development and Admission Specialist” which reveals a little about their membership strategy of the future. The some of the job description is quoted below, and emphasis is my own.

Professional Development and Admission Specialist

The role (Two year fixed term contract)

The Professional Development & Admissions Specialist will play a key role in the development of new Professional Development and Admissions initiatives, including Apprenticeship End Point Assessment, video conference Reviews and the introduction of plagiarism software.

Duties and Responsibilities

• … Designing and implementing operational procedures for video conference interviews.
• Designing and implementing the procedure for inputting documents and processing results following the introduction of ‘Turnitin’ plagiarism software.
• Assisting the Professional Development & Admissions Manager with the digitisation of Professional Review applications.
• …etc.

This comes off the back of some changes to their Written Exercise where they effectively admitted it was permissible to look things up on the internet during your Written Exercise (the wording from the previous Guidance Notes was “usage of internet is not recommended” or words to that effect), and also ‘folders of information' with the exception of 2 sides of A4 will also be prohibited from next year.

However, a video conference for your Professional Review Interview would be an interesting way to target members in locations where ICE do not visit for reviews, such as North and South America, nearly the whole of Continental Europe, Africa and Central Asia.

Some immediate questions spring to mind though:

• What is the eligibility criteria for video reviews?
• How do they ensure the candidate is doing things properly? Would they be asked to spin the camera around to show no-one else is in the room? (a ‘helper' could feasibly duck under a table then pop back behind the camera during interview.)
• Would Professional Review fees be any different to face-to-face? (my intuition say no.)
• How do they offer and enforce a remote Written Exercise?

The ICE could learn something from their rivals next door, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, as they have been doing video Professional Reviews for a while. In fact I did my own CEng review by webcam, but faulty electronics at IMechE headquarters on the day scuppered my interview and it was abandoned and a face-to-face interview was rescheduled the next month. Despite my one-off glitch, my membership contact at IMechE assures me they are implementing it successfully for all other candidates.

(And if someone at ICE is reading this wondering where they can find a “Professional Review and Admission Specialist” who is a CEng Reviewer, knows a thing or two about doing things online, and has seen first hand how a real CEng interview can go wrong, we do business consultation contracts too!)