The Portfolio That Was Not His
Engr. B. I. is a mentor and uncle of a candidate applying for COREN professional registration. The candidate has a B.Eng from an accredited university, has completed NYSC, and claims five years of experience with a contractor. His portfolio lists an 11 kV feeder upgrade as “design lead”; the panel’s site visit notes show that at the time he was a site clerk, and the design was signed by another engineer. His CPD log contains 14 entries, 11 of them one-hour webinars attended in the three weeks before the application. His mentor’s report says he “has demonstrated competence in all areas” but gives no examples. The interview slot is 25 minutes and the panel has already spent 8 minutes on his CV.
1. What should the panel probe in the remaining interview time, and what evidence should it require after the interview?
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The panel should stop spending time on the CV and test the two weak claims directly.
First, the feeder upgrade. Ask the candidate to explain his own contribution: what data he collected, what calculations he performed, how he selected the conductor and protection settings, what he did about earthing and coordination with upstream protection, and who checked his work. A genuine design lead can explain the constraints and the alternatives rejected. A site clerk will tend to describe meetings and deliveries rather than design decisions.
Second, the CPD log. Ask what he learned from two or three of the webinars and how he applied it. Eleven one-hour webinars in three weeks is a compliance pattern, not evidence of sustained development.
After the interview, the panel should verify employment dates and roles with the contractor and the signing engineer, request the design calculation file and site records, and seek a referee who supervised him. The mentor’s report should be tested against those records. The panel should document inconsistencies and give the candidate an opportunity to explain before drawing an adverse inference.
2. How should the panel assess the portfolio, the CPD record and the mentor’s report against the competence requirements?
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The panel should assess evidence, not assertions. A portfolio entry counts only for the work the candidate personally performed and can defend. If the feeder upgrade was signed by another engineer and the candidate was a site clerk, it may still show relevant site experience, but it cannot be credited as design leadership. The panel should reclassify it accordingly and check whether the remaining experience demonstrates progressively responsible work across the required competencies.
CPD should be judged for relevance, depth and application, not entry count. Fourteen hours, mostly short webinars compressed into three weeks, does not show sustained professional development. The panel should ask for evidence of application, such as a calculation, procedure or site decision informed by the CPD.
The mentor’s report is deficient because it makes a global conclusion without examples and comes from a relative, creating a conflict of interest. The panel should give it little weight unless corroborated. The mentor should be asked for specific observations and, if the report was signed knowing it was unsupported, the panel should consider referring the mentor’s conduct under the professional discipline process.
3. Recommend the panel’s decision options and explain how it should be reasoned and recorded.
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The panel has three realistic options: defer, reject, or pass with conditions.
Defer is appropriate if the candidate has genuine but poorly evidenced experience. The panel should specify what is missing, for example six months of documented design work under supervision, a logbook signed by a licensed engineer, and CPD spread over the period with reflective notes. A deferral gives a route to demonstrate competence without rewarding exaggeration.
Reject is appropriate if the candidate knowingly claimed design leadership that he did not exercise and maintained the claim when questioned. That is a misrepresentation, not a documentation gap, and it goes to integrity as well as competence.
A conditional pass is not appropriate where the core design claim is unverified, because the panel cannot certify competence it has not seen.
The decision should record the specific entries accepted and rejected, the evidence relied on, the candidate’s explanations, and the reasons for the outcome. The panel should also decide whether the mentor’s report warrants a separate referral. Recording the reasoning protects the candidate’s right to review and protects the panel if the decision is challenged.