CDR writing

CDRsample

This article concentrates on CDR writing as part of Migration Skills assessment process.

The main parts of the CDR are 3 Career Episodes, Summary Statement and CPD.

What to include in your Career Episodes:

When you write your Career Episodes as part of your CDR (Competency Demonstration Report) you need to include basic information in it as well as details in regards to your professional engineering experience.

Basic information that needs to be included in each of your Career Episodes is information such as place of work, project title, country, project dates in Introduction section and project objective and list of your duties, hierarchic diagram etc in the Background section .

In the main part of the Career Episode, the “Personal Engineering Activity” you need to provide more details about your project. It is important that you write the entire Career Episode in “I” language: “I did”, “I designed” etc and describe your own part of the work done. Of course whatever you describe needs to be directly relevant to your profession and ANZSCO code.

The core part of every professional engineering Career Episode is your design activities. You need to describe your design activities with details such as design stages and your role in these stages. What calculations you have performed including provision of sample major calculations and formulas used. You need to include the main design drawings, charts and graphs within your Career Episodes.

The Engineers Australia have only recently started to require details such as charts, graphs, diagrams, calculations within the Career Episodes; this new requirement is not included in the MSA booklet. But according to our experience there has been a change in attitude recently as quite a few CDR came back with comment of “please include drawings, charts, graphs and calculations in your Career Episodes” and we are sharing our experience with you.

**Summary Statement writing: **

Summary Statement is the most difficult and most confusing part of the CDR. Most probably this part would require most of your time spent on CDR writing. The Summary Statement preparation is difficult because of the following factors:

1. It is difficult to understand what Engineers Australia mean from reading the indicators description in EA booklet
2. It is difficult to understand how to word the indicators in your own Summary Statement
3. It takes long time to find all the relevant reference paragraphs in Career Episodes and choose the most appropriate ones

Also, when you completed the Career Episodes and started working on the Summary Statement, many times you will need to edit your Career Episodes to add more information to cover better a specific element in the Summary Statement. When you do this, often you will need to add one or more paragraphs to your Career Episodes. This would change the paragraphs numbering and if you already wrote further paragraphs as reference paragraphs in the Summary Statement, you will need to fix it all.

In general, before your start working on your Summary Statement, first of all you need to read the description of all indicators relevant to your Occupational Category (for example the indicators for Professional Engineer are given on pages 32-36 of the EA booklet). MSA booklet is available from here: https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/For-Migrants/Migration-Skills-Assessment/MSA-StepByStep-Guide

When reading, you should check if there is any major piece of information you are not covering in your Career Episodes. For example, if you don’t make any reference to standards you used in your work (technical standards, safety standards etc.) – This is a major information missing and you should add the missing information to your Career Episodes before you carry on to work on your Summary Statement.

The general rule set by EA is that you demonstrate all competencies in your Career Episodes jointly, but we would advise you to cover as many indicators as possible in each of your Career Episode.

Also, except the very first element, we would advise you to have at least two indicators covered (with their reference paragraphs) in the first and the third parts of the Summary Statement (Knowledge and Skills Base and Professional and Personal Attributes). And at least three indicators covered in the second part of the Summary Statement (Engineering Application Ability). Don’t take a risk and write just one indicator in an element that intended to demonstrate your engineering design activities (PE2.3) for example. Such approach would lead to your entire CDR to fail.

If you need any help in your CDR preparation, please visit us at https://cdrsample.com/ or contact us on [email protected]

Contact us if you have your Career Episodes ready and only need help with the Summary Statement or if you need your CDR from scratch.

We also have a lot of free information on our web site blogs http://cdrsample.com/blogs/ and on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/cdrsample including the full guidance on CDR writing.