Environmental Engineer CV Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is for a chartered environmental engineer with seven years in consultancy who works across water treatment design and contaminated land remediation. The name, firms and universities are invented. Students and new graduates should keep the layout and swap experience for modules, projects and placements; there is a section for that below.

Environmental engineering hiring is driven by billability and by who can lead and check design. A director or team manager reading your CV is answering four questions.

• Where are you on the professional ladder? Graduate member, IEng or CEng, and through which institution. Chartered engineers can lead and check design and bill higher, so this belongs in the header or the personal statement, not on page two.
• Which media and sector? Water and wastewater design, air quality permitting, site investigation and remediation, waste, industrial compliance and EIA work are separate practice groups with separate hiring managers.
• Which regulations have you actually worked under? The Environmental Permitting Regulations, water discharge and groundwater activities, Part 2A contaminated land, hazardous waste rules, the EIA Regulations, drinking water quality regulations. Naming a regulation you only studied is easy to catch in an interview.
• What can you run without supervision? Models, drawings, permit applications, field programmes, cost estimates. Say who reviewed your work and who you reviewed.

“Two things get a CV onto my shortlist: professional status stated plainly, and project sizes I can compare to my current backlog. If you designed a 15 Ml/d upgrade or you closed a site with the regulator, say so in the first four lines. A page of duties without a single flow rate goes back in the pile.”

Chartered and incorporated titles are awarded by the Engineering Council through a licensed institution, so name the title, the institution and the year. Use the exact names. Guessing at credential titles is one of the fastest ways to look junior.

1. 1Start with the engineering verb: designed, modelled, permitted, sampled, evaluated, remediated, negotiated, commissioned.
2. 2Add the size in the unit your field uses: Ml/d, m³/s, tonnes per year, cubic metres, hectares, boreholes, sites, £ value.
3. 3Name the regulation or standard the work sat under, when there was one.
4. 4Name the software or method if it is a hiring keyword in your sector.
5. 5End with the outcome: permit issued, site signed off, budget saved, breach avoided, programme met.

Split this so a reviewer can match you to a practice group. Include only what you would be comfortable being tested on.

Technical and regulatory:

• Water and wastewater treatment process design, hydraulics, pumping and conveyance
• Environmental permits for water discharge and groundwater activities, compliance monitoring, trade effluent consents
• Air: installation permits (Part A(1) and A(2)), emissions inventories, Pollution Inventory reporting
• Hazardous waste classification (WM3), waste duty of care, consignment notes and waste returns
• Part 2A contaminated land and planning-led remediation, risk assessment inputs, verification reports
• Phase 1 desk studies and Phase 2 site investigations to LCRM and BS 10175
• Surface water: SuDS design, CEMPs, silt and pollution prevention on construction sites
• Environmental Impact Assessment support: screening, scoping and technical chapters

Software and modelling:

• EPANET, WaterGEMS, InfoWorks ICM, HEC-RAS
• BioWin or GPS-X for wastewater process modelling
• AERMOD or ADMS for air dispersion
• MODFLOW or Groundwater Vistas
• ArcGIS Pro or QGIS, AutoCAD Civil 3D, Revit where used
• R or Python for data evaluation, advanced Excel

The parts that get engineers promoted, written plainly: you can write a report a regulator accepts without three rounds of comments, you can stand in front of a parish council or a public consultation and explain a scheme, and you can tell a client early when a programme is not going to hold. Give one concrete example of each rather than listing them as traits.

For a new graduate the accredited degree and one real project usually decide the interview. Firms know you cannot design a treatment works yet. They want to see that you can be billable within a few months.

• Put your degree, its accreditation, your classification and your student or graduate membership (CIWEM, ICE or IEMA) near the top.
• Give your final-year design project its own entry with the problem, the method, the software and the deliverable. Treat it like a job.
• List placements and summer internships with numbers: samples collected, sites visited, drawings produced, reports drafted.
• Add field-ready credentials that reduce a firm's onboarding cost: a CSCS card, confined space, first aid, a full driving licence and willingness to travel.
• Name your software honestly by level. "Built a 64 km EPANET model" beats "proficient in EPANET".
• Include lab and research work with the analytical methods you ran.

• One to two pages up to about 8 years. Two pages once you have a project list worth showing, which is normal in consultancy.
• Consider a short Selected Projects block with client type, size and your role. Consultancy managers read it first.
• Single column, no graphics. Engineering consultancies and their recruitment agencies run applications through tracking software.
• No photo, no date of birth. In the US the same role usually expects a state PE licence rather than chartered status, and the document there is called a resume.
• Mirror the advert's vocabulary: environmental permit, Part 2A, LCRM, Phase 1, Phase 2, CEMP, EIA, SuDS, Ml/d, remediation strategy, CEng, CIWEM, IEMA and the model names.
• Say whether you can travel and what percentage. Field-heavy roles filter hard on that.