Fascinating question. A soft copy logbook is certainly no problem as even records on Career Manager are ‘soft copy’. I can see some potential issues with an iPad, though.

Where is the logbook actually stored? If it is on the iPad itself, what happens if the iPad dies - do you lose all your records? If you want to have the logbook reviewed, does the reviewer have to use your iPad.

That aside, I would say that you should keep your logbook in a manner that suits you. It is after all for your benefit, not the IET's benefit, that it is kept. The logbook is not required to be submitted as part of your registration application so I personally don't see a problem, and if at a registration interview you are asked about a logbook and are able to whip out your iPad and demonstrate I am sure the interviewers would be happy. (Caveat - I am not an interviewer and therefore am just giving my personal opinion.)

Fully agree, AFAIK the only time you'd ever be asked to show something like a logbook is as evidence of CPD, and soft copy is definitely ok for that.

Don't bring it to interview, the interviewers will want to talk to you, not sit there reading a logbook!!! ? 

Use it for your own benefit, the most important thing by far is to use a format which is easy to use so that you can keep it up to date and find stuff in it. Soft logbooks are definitely the way to go for this. Provided they are maintainable - make sure it is in a format that can be transferred (even if it's just exporting as a text file) as software systems become obsolete.

Regarding helping you move towards CEng, the benefit of keeping a logbook is that when you come to build your application you should be able to look back on it and remind yourself of what projects you did and when, technical issues you encountered and resolved, training courses etc you took (it's very easy to lose track of these), other pieces of experience you gained that may not be directly related to projects you worked on, etc. It isn't "evidence", because in the end you could write anything in there, but it really should help you when you are trying to remember what you did five years earlier. Include names of key people who you might want to go back to to support parts of your application (and contact details if they offer them, but mostly it's better to find them on LinkedIn when you need to - apart from data protection issues, phone numbers and email addresses go out of date quickly). You will want to carry it with you as you move companies, so don't put anything in, particularly technical details, that are company confidential. 

Besides helping your application, it will also help with creating your CV, and when starting work on a project which relates to work you may have done several years earlier. So good thing to do anyway.

Thanks,

Andy