Can you call yourself a Systems Engineer if your job title says otherwise?
An engineer posted on a forum this month that he had been doing the job for three years before he found out it was a discipline with a name. Underneath, a queue of replies said the same thing had happened to them.
The question sounds like a matter of pride. It isn't. It decides whether an assessor accepts your application, whether a recruiter reads past your first line, and whether anyone on your programme thinks the integration has an owner. INCOSE settles it with a list, and your title is not on the list.
The 14 systems engineering experience areas.
INCOSE assesses experience against 14 areas. Each one names a kind of work and
the thing that work produces.
Requirements Engineering
System and Decision Analysis
Architecture and Design Development
Systems Integration
Verification and Validation
System Operation and Maintenance
Technical Planning
Technical Monitoring and Control
Acquisition and Supply
Information and Configuration Management
Risk and Opportunity Management
Lifecycle Process Definition and Management
Specialty Engineering
Organisational Project Enabling Activities
Take an engineer whose badge says Design Engineer. She wrote the interface control document between the power subsystem and the vehicle control unit. She spent six weeks on the integration campaign. She closed out the verification matrix before the design review. That is three areas. Her title names none of them.
Write what you built, never what you were called
INCOSE's application instructions say it in one line. "Simply stating a job title or position is not a description of experience."
Take that same engineer. On her application she could write "Systems Engineer, 2022 to 2025", and a reviewer can do nothing with that.
Or she could write "Wrote and maintained the interface control document between the power subsystem and the vehicle control unit, and updated it through three design changes." That one sentence gives them the area, the activity and the product.
A reviewer who has never met you cannot see your week. They can only read what you wrote down.
Three things that sink an application
Programme management comes first. INCOSE states that "non-technical roles/tasks in program management, resource management and business development are not regarded as SE functions". Owning the schedule and defending the budget is hard work on any programme. It sits outside the 14.
Student projects come second. Research and projects done only as a student earn no months.
Thin description comes third, and it is the common one. INCOSE warns that applications with insufficient detail may result in denial. The engineers we meet almost always have the experience. What they hand in is a tidied-up CV.
The month you can only spend once
You may count each calendar month once. Say a year went half on requirements and half on integration. That year gives you six months in one area and six in the other. It never gives you twelve and twelve.
Engineers who ignore this build an experience record that looks strong and falls apart the moment someone adds it up.
Do it project by project
Go through projects, not jobs. For each one write four things down: what the system was, which of the 14 areas the work belongs to, what you produced, and how many months it took. A sentence each is plenty.
Do this before you open any form. Start with the form and you will write a job description, which is the one thing the instructions tell you not to send.
Then look at what is missing. The areas you have never worked in are the more useful half of this exercise. They tell you what to ask for on your next project, and that is a conversation to have with your lead rather than with a training provider.
Where we come in
At the School of Systems Engineering, mapping experience to these areas is the hardest part of a CSEP application, so our course spends most of its time there. We go through your projects with you, put them against the areas INCOSE recognises, help you choose references, and read the application before it goes in. We are an endorsed training provider with the Institute for Systems Engineering (IfSE).
If you want the route through INCOSE certification itself, our post on how ASEP and CSEP fit together sets it out.
This week
Take your last three projects. Write one sentence each saying what you produced and which area it belongs to. Three areas with twelve months or more behind them means your experience counts, whatever the payroll system calls you.
Map your experience with us
Become INCOSE CSEP, our mentored application course.
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