My name is Keith Todd and I am a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers. Across my career I have worked for two consultancy practices, as well as two large organisations for whom I have worked directly in fire risk management roles. I have held almost all grades of membership of the IFE (Student, Technician, Graduate, Member and Fellow) as well as all grades of Engineering Council registration via the IFE (EngTech, IEng and CEng). I have been a registered fire risk assessor since 2013 and I am now part of the IFE’s Fire Risk Register Panel.
My career has developed, from initial work being principally involved in fire safety management (such as delivering training and conducting fire drills) through to now being involved in designing fire strategies for a range of buildings, and carrying out complex fire risk assessments, as well as overseeing and managing a professional consultancy team that deliver the full suite of fire safety services. Throughout my development, I have benchmarked my progress through my IFE memberships and registrations.
I am currently a Partner at Ridge and Partners LLP, and I am the Discipline Lead for Fire Safety within the multi-disciplinary practice. As part of my role, my technical work involves design and fire strategy work, complex fire risk assessments, and building safety risk assessment work relating to Higher Risk Buildings. There is no ‘typical’ day, as such. On some days, I will carry out quality assurance of work done by members of my team, and on others I might be on site carrying out surveys. I also prepare technical reports and provide direct support to clients on fire safety issues, as well as managing projects of varying scale and complexity. As a Partner, I also carry out management functions, including practice management, line management of staff, and budgetary and financial management.
One thing that is perhaps unusual is my involvement in both fire safety design and fire risk assessment. In my experience, these two areas are often covered by different specialists, and I suppose in some ways being a ‘generalist’ is an unusual aspect of a role in fire safety in 2025. In terms of challenges, the changes to the regulatory and supporting guidance frameworks has required rapid growth and extensive CPD, but these have been areas that I have enjoyed over the past few years.
I enjoy the wide range of buildings and associated technical challenges that my role offers me the opportunity to work on. I enjoy solving problems and much of my work in fire safety involves challenges that enable me to continue my growth and development as a fire safety professional.
I think that there are accomplishments and achievements in every role and every project that we take on in our careers. Some of the things I look back on as being career episodes from which I learned a great deal and developed as a professional would be the work that I did earlier in my career at University College London, particularly my involvement in the UCL Estate Masterplan programme, as well as working for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea as Head of Fire Safety in the years following the Grenfell Tower fire. However, there are individual design and fire risk assessment projects where I have taken satisfaction from knowing that I have made something better than how I found it. I was also very pleased to achieve CEng registration through the IFE, which was a process that I felt offered me the opportunity to reflect on my career to date and refocus my priorities for my future development.
At Ridge, I have been extremely lucky to work on a number of really exciting projects. These have ranged from cutting-edge Formula 1 facilities to Grade I Listed heritage projects. I consider each project that results in completion to be an accomplishment in its own way, and I take great pride and enjoyment from the work that I do as part of each of the projects that I get involved in.
My father being a fire engineer definitely was a source of inspiration. At the start of my career in fire safety, working for his company amongst some of the best engineers and risk assessors was something that I look back on now and realise I was very lucky to have the opportunity to do.
Again, working in teams in my first two roles with fire professionals to whom I looked up to was a source of inspiration to me personally, and those professionals all were or aspired to be IFE members and registrants. For me, becoming professionally registered and developing through the grades of IFE membership was always a key part of measuring my career, and this continues to be the case. I believe that professional registration and membership now has the widespread recognition that it always warranted.
At the time I applied to join the Fire Risk Assessors register, I had started carrying out fire risk assessments for a range of university buildings. This included buildings now classed as Higher Risk Buildings, as well as large assembly spaces, and buildings in which cutting edge research was being carried out. For me at that time, becoming registered was critical to demonstrating to my employer and other stakeholders that I was able to carry out these tasks to the required standard.
I have benefitted from membership and registration through the career opportunities afforded to me and the projects that I have been lucky enough to work on. From the start of my career, there have been membership options open to me commensurate with where I have been on my career journey, and in turn this has provided me with a framework to build my professional experience on, with one of the outcomes being the potential for achieving the next grade of membership.
I have previously been involved in arranging CPD events for IFE London Branch. I have also delivered CPD sessions for IFE, including during COVID when many of these events were held online. I have volunteered for the IFE as an exam invigilator and also participated recently in the workshop held by IFE and Government on the future requirement for mandatory registration of fire engineers.
My current day-to-day volunteering commitment to the IFE is based around the work that I do for the IFE’s Fire Risk Register Panel. As part of this, I review and interview applicants to the Fire Risk Assessors Register.
I would absolutely recommend joining the IFE. The IFE is our relevant industry Professional Engineering Institution, and if you are seeking to develop your career in fire safety, or you want to be considered by your peers to be a ‘fire engineer’, the IFE is the recognised body to do this with. There are opportunities to actively engage with peers and to learn from others, as well as having access to CPD and other beneficial materials, and overall, I have enjoyed the benefits of being actively engaged with the IFE throughout my career.
Spend time thinking about your CPD. CPD is not simply filling in the sheet and scrambling around for online seminars about irrelevant topics or sales pitches for products and systems. CPD is about working out what you need to know to carry out suitable and sufficient FRAs, working out how you are going to learn it, and then carrying out the learning. It is about reflecting on that learning to evaluate its effectiveness and identifying further gaps in a continuous process. So often, people treat CPD as a ‘tick box’ exercise, and there is so much essential CPD that you need to do, so take it seriously.
Also, whether you routinely assess HRBs or not, if you are going for top level registration, such as that offered by the IFE, you need to have a good understanding of fire risk related issues specifically relevant to HRBs. Do your research on design principles, particularly those on historical guidance and approaches and how to pragmatically address them in the course of fire risk assessments, and make sure you thoroughly understand the current regulatory regime. This can be a pitfall for some applicants.