Chemical Engineer CV Examples & Writing Guide

The engineer below is invented. The structure is what a plant manager or an engineering recruiter expects: unit operations named, software named, safety work named, and a pound or percentage figure on nearly every line. Vague project descriptions are the most common reason a technically strong candidate gets passed over.

Chemical engineering CVs are screened by two different readers. A recruiter looks for keywords and professional registration. The hiring engineer looks for whether you have touched equipment like theirs. Write for both.

• Unit operations. Distillation, extraction, crystallisation, drying, extrusion, fermentation, heat transfer, reaction. Say which ones you owned, not just studied.
• Process safety. HAZOP, LOPA, process safety management on COMAH sites, MOC, relief sizing, incident investigation. A plant will not hire an engineer who treats safety as an afterthought on the page.
• Software. Aspen HYSYS, Aspen Plus, PRO/II, ChemCAD, Minitab, MATLAB, Python, the DCS and the historian. These are searched literally, so spell them out.
• Money and yield. Percent yield gained, energy or raw material cost cut, throughput added, downtime removed, capital delivered. Engineering managers translate everything into pounds.
• Registration and degree. An IChemE-accredited BEng or MEng is the baseline. Chartership (CEng MIChemE) matters most in consultancy, design contractors and senior process safety roles.

“Half the chemical engineering CVs I get say 'optimised processes'. That means nothing. Tell me the column, the change you made, and the number that moved. If you led a HAZOP, say how many nodes and how many actions you closed. That is the CV I forward to the plant.”

Three sentences: years and plant type, the technical centre of gravity, then professional status and tools. New graduates use a career objective; everyone else uses a personal statement.

The pattern is always the same: what you changed, on what equipment, and what number moved. Add the constraint you worked under if there was one, such as no capital or a running plant.

Split the block so a screener can find the software instantly and the hiring engineer can find the process depth. Twelve to sixteen items total.

• Simulation and modelling: Aspen HYSYS, Aspen Plus, AVEVA PRO/II, ChemCAD, gPROMS, COMSOL, MATLAB, Python (pandas, NumPy), Excel with VBA.

• Process and unit operations: distillation and column troubleshooting, heat exchanger design and fouling, reaction kinetics and reactor sizing, separations, drying and crystallisation, pumps and hydraulics, relief system sizing to API 520 and 521, mass and energy balances.

• Safety and quality systems: process safety management, COMAH and DSEAR, HAZOP, LOPA, PHA, Management of Change, incident investigation, GMP and validation (IQ/OQ/PQ) if you are in pharma, Six Sigma and statistical process control, ISO 9001.

• Plant systems and drawings: P&ID and PFD development, DCS platforms (DeltaV, Honeywell Experion, Rockwell), historians (OSIsoft PI, AVEVA PI), SAP plant maintenance, AutoCAD, isometrics and equipment datasheets.

• The parts people forget: explaining a change to operators who have run the unit for 20 years, writing a capital sanction paper a finance manager will approve, and standing your ground on a safety case when the schedule is under pressure.

In the UK there is no licence to practise as a chemical engineer. Chartered Engineer (CEng) registration is granted by the Engineering Council through a licensed institution, for chemical engineers usually the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE). The order is fixed: accredited degree, then supervised experience (often on a graduate scheme), then the institution's competence assessment and professional review.

• IChemE-accredited BEng or MEng in Chemical Engineering. Say accredited on the CV, because employers and the CEng route care.
• IChemE membership grade: student member at university, Associate Member (AMIChemE) as a graduate, then Member (MIChemE) once your competence is assessed. List the grade you actually hold.
• Chartered Engineer (CEng) through IChemE, plus the years of responsible experience the institution expects. Requirements change, so check IChemE's current guidance rather than a general article.
• Six Sigma Green Belt or Black Belt from a recognised provider or an employer programme, useful in manufacturing roles that live on yield and variation.
• Process and site safety training such as the NEBOSH HSE Certificate in Process Safety Management, IOSH Managing Safely and DSEAR/ATEX awareness, expected at many major hazard sites and often paid for by the employer.
• IChemE special interest groups or local member groups. Small signal, but it costs nothing to list.
• Project management credentials such as APM PMQ or PRINCE2 if you are moving towards capital project engineering.

Put CEng and your membership grade after your name in the header if you hold them (for example, CEng MIChemE). If you do not, list your IChemE grade and graduate scheme in the certifications block. If your CEng application is in progress, say so plainly with the expected review date rather than implying you already hold it.

New graduates compete on the same page as people with plant time, so the answer is not to pad. It is to make your projects read like engineering work with numbers, and to put anything that happened inside a real facility at the top.

1. 1Lead with industrial placements, summer internships and undergraduate research, above modules. Any time spent inside an operating plant outranks a classroom project.
2. 2Write your final-year design project as a real project: the process, the basis, the capacity, the economics you calculated, the software you used and what you concluded.
3. 3Put your IChemE student or associate membership on there, and any accredited graduate scheme you are joining. It shows employers you are already on the route to chartership.
4. 4List software honestly with a level. "Aspen Plus (modules and design project), Minitab (intermediate), Python (data analysis)" is more credible than a flat list.
5. 5Include lab and pilot plant work: distillation column operation, heat exchanger experiments, reactor kinetics, safety training completed.
6. 6Add your degree classification (or predicted grade) if it is a 2:1 or above, plus any technical leadership such as a chemical engineering society committee role or a design competition team.

Chemical engineering is not one job market. The same CV sent to a refinery and a drug maker will underperform in both. Rewrite the top third for the industry you are applying to.

• Refining and petrochemical: lead with unit names (crude, vacuum, FCC, hydrotreating, alkylation), throughput, turnaround experience, energy and margin work, and process safety history.
• Pharmaceutical and biotech: lead with GMP, batch records, validation protocols, deviations and CAPAs, tech transfer, scale-up from pilot, and MHRA or FDA inspection experience.
• Specialty and fine chemicals: lead with batch flexibility, campaign changeovers, grade transitions, scale-up, and customer-driven quality specifications.
• Food, beverage and consumer goods: lead with sanitation and HACCP, line efficiency and OEE, packaging interfaces, and shelf-life or formulation work.
• Semiconductor and materials: lead with cleanroom experience, gas and chemical delivery systems, ultrapure water, defect reduction and tool qualification.
• Environmental, water and consultancy: lead with environmental permits, air and water treatment design, regulatory reporting, client deliverables and chartership, which carries more weight here than almost anywhere else.

• One to two pages for graduates and the first few years, two pages after that. Two pages is normal and expected for a senior process engineer with a project list.
• Reverse chronological. A skills-first functional layout reads as hiding something in engineering hiring.
• No photo, no date of birth, no nationality on a UK CV. Mention your right to work in the UK only if the advert asks for it or it is not obvious from your history.
• Spell out software, unit operations and standards, because tracking systems match text: "Aspen HYSYS", "HAZOP", "API 520", "COMAH", "P&ID", "GMP", "MOC".
• Mirror the advert's job title. Chemical engineer, process engineer, process safety engineer, technical services engineer and manufacturing engineer are different searches even where the work overlaps.
• Keep a projects section only if it adds something the job bullets do not, such as capital work or cross-site rollouts.
• Save as PDF with your name in the filename, and keep the file under a couple of megabytes for portals that reject large uploads.

Final check: pick any three bullets at random. Does each one name equipment or a method and carry a number? If not, that bullet is still a job description rather than evidence.