Career Episode Writing Help

Career Episode Writing

Career Episode writing is a crucial aspect of your Competency Demonstration Report (CDR) – required by Engineers Australia (EA) to judge whether your engineering skills and knowledge match the Australian standards or not. Engineers who want to migrate to Australia have to apply under one of the four occupational categories defined by EA for Skilled Migration:

• Professional Engineers
• Engineering Technologists
• Engineering Associates
• Engineering Managers

EA lists competencies for each of these categories. When you write your Career Episode Report, you must keep in mind that you are specifically writing it to demonstrate that you have all the competency elements mentioned under the occupation category for which you are applying.

Topics for Career Episode Writing

Career Episodes show that you have applied knowledge and skills for your nominated occupation. Since you have to write three CEs in CDR, you need to choose your career episode topics wisely. Here are three chances to weave the competency elements mentioned by EA into specific your career-related experiences. You can pick up an idea from your Career Episode from the following:

• Engineering projects you undertook, workshops you attended, or tech fests you participated in during your educational program
• A project you have worked on (or are currently working on) during the beginning of your career
• A specific position you occupied (or currently occupy) in your career. Remember, that in this case, you do not merely have to state what were your key responsibilities or your team achievements. EA wants to see what role you particularly played in the company. An active sense of duty is preferred.
• Any particular engineering problem or innovation you worked on.

7 Wise Tips from our Career Episode Writing Experts

1. When you are brainstorming on the Career Episode topic, it is a good idea to have the EA list of competencies in front of you. Think of the times where you applied those particular competencies in your career span – and weave a Career Episode around it. Remember that you will have to support your claims with evidences. Hence, stick to the facts and details that you can prove to be true.
2. Keep your CE within the specified word limit (1000 to 2500 words), do not include too many technical jargons in your career episode, and use correct Australian English. Your CDR report is used by your assessor to judge your communication skills too. Hence, be careful about how to present your narrative.
3. In a Career Episode, focus on applications of engineering knowledge and skills you have. Always use the first person to define your person, in singular, to define your personal role in the incident you set out to narrate. EA assessors look for words like ‘I designed’, ‘I planned’, ‘I measured’, ‘I calculated’, ‘I investigated’ etc. to know what all you are capable of doing.
4. Avoid using tables, calculations, or photos that make your essay look too technical but when you are telling about an engineering problem you identified and solved, it is best to describe the problem-solving techniques you used in detail – to make your Career Episode look more believable.
5. Each Career Episode should ideally have four sections: Introduction, Background, Personal Engineering Activity and Summary. They should be prepared as follows:

• Introduction: In about 100 words, it should mention the chronology of the career episode (in which phase of your career it happened), dates and duration of the episode, geographical location where it happened, name of the institute or organisation involved, and your position there.
• Background: In about 200 to 500 words, describe the context of what you were studying or working on at the time. You may mention the nature and objectives of the engineering project you undertook, the particular work area you were involved with, the organisational structure chart or the organigram which highlights your position in the organisation at the time, and your job description, key responsibilities or job profile at the organisation. You may have to substantiate any claims with the official duty statement or appointment letter you received.
• Personal Engineering Activity: In about 500 to 1000 words, describe the actual work you set out to narrate. Focus on the engineering-related tasks you performed. Talk about how you applied your engineering skills and knowledge to the situation, what task was delegated to you and how you accomplished it, and technical difficulties or challenges you faced and how you overcame them. Focus on any innovations, creative designs, unusual strategies or original ideas you came up with. You can also talk about your relationship with your team members and you role as a team leader or negotiator or astute follower.
• Summary: At the end, write a summary for your Career Episode that highlights all the engineering-related competencies you demonstrated in that particular narrative.

6. Don’t let your Career Episode be too generic or too technical. You should be balanced in your approach. When you say, ‘I designed a circuit board’, you might add details like which parts you used to make it, which design software tool you used, things in which you needed to collaborate with others, and where and why you needed revisions in its circuit designing. On the other hand, be wary of including so many technical details that you are not able to include other elements of the project as the pioneering processes you were a part of, reporting and communication mechanism of the project, and cost-related decisions you were involved with.
7. Do not get distracted while writing a Career Episode. Remember, it is about you and your capabilities – and now what your team or department did. The assessors are not interested in sentences like ‘we simulated’ or ‘we designed’. They only have eyes for ‘I designed’, ‘I did’ etc. that shows your role in the team and your contribution to the project. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to resort to ‘lying’ about your role in the time. If you are not able to prove any of the claims you make in your CDR, it is likely to get rejected by EA.

CDRReport.org has a team of expert CDR writers and editors who can write you best Career Episodes. They ask you the right questions and offer you customised CE solutions quickly. Contact them at info@cdrreport.org.