Membership - Guidance Notes

Applications for membership to the Planning Engineers Organisation do not include a face-to-face professional interview, or the sitting of an examination. The granting of membership to the PEO is taken very seriously to ensure applicants have the right skills and experience to be granted membership. The application process is therefore necessarily very comprehensive.

Applicants to Member or Fellow grade not only need to submit personal details, but also write three papers. The purpose of this is two-fold. Firstly, to demonstrate the applicants level of expertise and secondly, to provide information that will be published on this website. Sharing knowledge and experiences is one of the important objectives of the PEO and some of the information supplied as part of the application for membership will be shared with other members. The information required as part of the application process includes the following:

• The first will set out "how" they work - how they develop a programme or schedule, what systems, software and methods do they use, how do they interact with other professionals, what have they personally achieved in their careers.
• The second paper will be a case study of one completed project they have worked upon. This will largely centre upon how the planning / scheduling of the time aspects of the project were controlled, how this was achieved, how long did the project take and what influenced the time taken. This is a vitally important component of the membership application process as it not only provides an example of accomplishment on the part of the applicant, but also this information will be made available (assuming the membership application is successful) on this website to all other members. The PEO accepts and appreciates that some of the information asked for in the project case study might in some respects be sensitive to the employer / client. If this is the case, enter "confidential" in the project name section of the application form. In this way, there is no need to disclose the name of the project, but will still allow the applicant to submit the other details.
• The third paper is a 2000 word (Member grade) or 3000 word (Fellow grade) dissertation paper on any aspect of planning or scheduling. This could be about a new method, system, technique or production facility that the applicant has experience in. These dissertation papers would also be published on this website and made available to members.

Details of the requirements of these three papers are set out on the Membership Application form.

Membership applications would also require two referee's for validation of the applicants achievements and experience.

The membership applications will then be checked, not by a traditional membership committee meeting once per month or so, but by a "Membership Panel". Your application will be sent by e-mail to people who form the Membership Panel. This panel comprises expert planners and schedulers who have comprehensive experience in their own particular industry. For example, the Membership Panel comprises people from the aviation, civil engineering, defence, manufacturing, nuclear, petro-chemical, railways, space and water treatment industries to name a few. This ensures that membership applications are reviewed by experts from the applicant's own industry. Peer verification is therefore very important to us.

After the Membership Panel have accepted the applicant into the PEO, the new member's details (not personal) along with their project case studies and dissertation paper, will be up-loaded on to this website. This process alone means that different experiences and knowledge of members are available to all other members - a tremendous sharing of best practice knowledge.