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How does professional qualification help employers

Find out how you can support your employees' professional development and give your organisation an advantage.

As an employer, you'll know how important a skilled workforce is. But having those skills widely recognised can benefit you and your staff.

Getting an ICE professional qualification gives engineering professionals more credibility for what they know, what they can do and how well they do it. This gives employers a big advantage by:

  • Helping to raise standards in your organisation
  • Making you stand out to clients when bidding for work
  • Developing your employees, maximising their potential and increasing job satisfaction
  • Making you more attractive to new talent

One of the most effective ways to help your staff become professionally qualified by starting an ICE Training Scheme.

ICE Training Scheme

This is a structured training programme developed by ICE and used by employers. The ICE Training Scheme sets out how employers support staff to complete an important stage of the qualification – their initial professional development (IPD).

Employers help trainees get the experience they need to develop skills and knowledge in a work environment. Another commitment employers make is to provide trainees with a supervising civil engineer. This is generally an experienced civil engineer who gives the trainee advice and guidance throughout the scheme and beyond.

How do schemes benefit employers?

If you run a training scheme, we'll add you to our database of approved employers. This is a searchable record of the organisations we work with, which many graduates use when considering potential employers.

How do employers manage the scheme?

We've developed two online tools to make it easier for employers to manage schemes and monitor trainees' progress.

Training Agreements Online (TAGSO) helps you deal with the administrative side of schemes, including registering trainees, making payments and approving schemes as completed.

Your trainees are able to register, link themselves with your training scheme and then use our IPD Online tool. This allows them to plan and record their IPD in real time and helps your staff manage training and oversee progression.

The IPD online tool allows access for Training Scheme Administrators (TSA). A TSA could be anyone who is required to have an overview of the company’s trainees including SCEs, HR Managers or Learning and Development Managers.

A TSA can use the IPD Online tool to:

  • view all active trainees and their progress on an active training scheme
  • follow trainee’s progress through their Initial Professional Development
  • add and remove other TSAs on the system

A TSA should also support trainees, SCEs and DE on the ICE Training Scheme. They will be able to ensure the records of the Training Scheme are correct and relevant.

TSAs don’t need to be ICE members, but will need to register with ICE as a non-member if they aren’t.

How can I start a training scheme?

If you're based in the UK, Hong Kong, UAE, Australia or New Zealand, and interested in setting up a scheme, the best place to start is by contacting your regional office.

If you're based outside these regions, don't worry. You can get the support you need by emailing e: [email protected].

You'll also need to ensure that a scheme you setup is supported by at least one supervising civil engineer.

Training Scheme extranet

If your company currently has an ICE Approved Training Scheme, you can login to our employer extranet to manage the scheme.

Visit employer extranet

Got a question?

If you've got a question about an existing ICE Training Scheme or are interested in setting one up, then please let us know.