Filling in Your Application Form
This
post is about some aspects on filling in your IEM Application Form i.e. your application to
become a Corporate Member of the Institution of Engineers Malaysia. The title may give the impression that it is
a trivial and mundane task and due to this impression, many applicants get
rejected. Let’s focus on what may possibly
go wrong in the Application Form process.
Nicking a Corporate Member’s Report
In
the new form that is implemented since September 2007, the applicant is
required to submit their Training and Experience Report. This report shall not be discussed in detail here
but the problem with the report is that many candidates are so very eager to
obtain their Professional Status that some resorted to obtaining a copy of
their Senior Engineers’ or newly elected Corporate Members’ Training and
Experience Report and copy them. Perhaps
in future, serious disciplinary actions could be imposed upon these sorts of unethical
actions. This sort of unhealthy practice
usually occurs when the candidate(s) came from a medium to large organisation and
access to a copy from his or her seniors is easy. Please don’t risk it. English may not be your first language but no
matter what, you should not copy and nick sentences off from your senior’s
report. My advice is that if you really
need to copy, do change the words and make your own sentences. The best would be to write something
original. It is weird how one cannot
describe one’s own experience in words where this experience is supposed to be
personal and experienced by oneself and not from a senior’s report.
Experience Shortcut
Some
design engineers may have lots of design office experience but perhaps no site
experience. If you do not have site
experience, do ask your superior to put you at the construction site. Some applicants, even though without any site
experience would try their luck by claiming that they have 12 months of site
experience. Similarly, some site
experienced engineers would try to claim that they have 12 months of design experience. This is how your application gets
rejected. Firstly, if you write
something not logical and does not substantiate the 12 months (which is the
minimum you require), then you could easily get rejected. There will be a gauge on whether you actually
have the 12 months. If you could justify
yourself well, then you should be ok.
Let’s
say you were with a company for one year i.e. 12 months. You have to justify that you actually carried
out 12 months of design work. For example
in Column A, you filled in 1 Jan 2014 to 1 Jan 2015. It would be quite difficult to justify that
you have exactly 12 months of design work experience. It would be difficult to justify unless your
company is giving you job continuously and you have a design task for the whole
one year and you did not take any leave whatsoever. Be honest.
Maybe from 1 Jan 2014 to 1 Jan 2015, you only actually touched design
work for 11 months. But there are also
techniques to obtain 12 months in full.
It really depends on your writing.
Making IEM’s Life Difficult
You
could make IEM’s life easier by giving out more detail. Some rejected applicants and some who are about
to submit their application forms had approached me and this is the advice I
give them: - “Just be very detailed in order to clear all ambiguities”. Can you imagine a candidate writing the
following: -
In
Column A, 1 Jan 2014 to 1 Jan 2019
In
Column B, 1) Proposed Addition and Alteration to Bungalow on Lot……
2) Proposed Demolition
and Construction of Existing Building and ….
3) Proposed Construction
of New 5 Storey Hostel……..
The
candidate merely includes the title of the projects. This will make the life of IEM difficult
because IEM cannot guess what you experienced by just stating those
titles. They are not mind readers. Even if you mentioned that you were involved
in the projects, IEM cannot gauge your involvement as they are not psychic. It would be better if you said that you were
involved in the RC design, foundation design, etc. Even if your Training and Experience Report
may have detailed information, your application form should be brief but as
detailed as possible too.
The
other issue to look out for is the duration of the project. One could have mentioned that he had been
working from beginning of 2014 to end of 2018.
But however, he only listed three projects as illustrated above. IEM would also be interested to know how many
months one spent on a particular project.
Again, IEM cannot be guessing.
So, for each of the projects you mentioned, do include how many months
you used for a particular project.
