[Tim]

Hi all, my names Danny, I'm a structural facade engineer and having difficulty in deciding my route to chartership now that the istructe removed the facades related question from the exam.

I have been a graduate member for around 5 years; graduating with an accredited M.Eng degree. I have lots of structural design experience with steel, glass and aluminium but little in the way of masonry and timber. I have designed numerous steel framed canopy structures of complex 3D geometry but little experience in the way of multi-storey building super structure and foundations.

I and perhaps like many structural engineers working in the facade industry was frustrated to see the question removed from the exam and are concerned as to how they would fair designing buildings with foundations etc, particularly in the 7 hour time frame. Is it perhaps best to now consider the ice route to chartership? I would need to consider how I approach the management and commercial side carefully as have largely been working on the technical more core engineering side of things. Do you think this is all taken in to consideration in the professional review? Any advice is most appreciated. Thanks.

I had the same situation, but in the context of offshore structures rather than facades. It's a bit unfortunate that IStructE did what they did, but unless you can get steel and concrete building or bridge experience you will find it near-impossible to pass the IStructE exam.

I would suggest following ICE for your case, or possible CIBSE though I have no idea how CIBSE works (maybe they follow UK-SPEC?). In any case your best bet would be to try to get onto some training courses or teach yourself the commercial and management skills and try to start integrating them into your daily work. Over time you should be able to notice your day-to-day decisions are made through holistic judgement - which includes your commercial, managerial, sustainability and health and safety abilities- rather than pure technical and engineering judgement. That's the point you should be applying for CEng review.