I recently went for my IStructE Professional Review Interview. It seemed to go okay, and I hear back formally in the next few weeks. Here are my reflections from the day.

The Presentation

I led the initial presentation with three project sheets giving a summary of the job, relevant Core Objectives and what I learnt. I think these were helpful for me and the interviewers as a single page focus, so we didn’t need to flick back and forth through the wedge of paper I had provided for this part.

The Questions

I posted some of the questions I can remember in the forum, but generally, it was a discussion focussed on my portfolio, going through the objectives one at a time. I knew my portfolio well and had a bank of ‘STAR’ answers to draw from linked to various projects in there, so was able to give specific examples when answering questions.

Reflections

Portfolio feedback was generally good – thorough but a bit large. If I were giving advice to others it would be to provide well-annotated quality evidence, and to be able to expand on it in your interview and give reasons for your decisions. I spent a (significant) while removing pages from reports and calculations that did not do exactly what I wanted, and I could have targeted my evidence much better from the start of the process.

Next up

Assuming I’ve passed the interview!:

• Looking at an exam/conceptual design course to go on
• Putting together a preparation schedule. I'm looking to do some background work now but start in earnest in January
• Follow the schedule all the way until 5pm on 7th July 2017….

 

How did your IStructE Professional Review Interview go? Leave a comment here or in the forum.