There are several e-petitions on the Downing Street web site that call for greater status, in law, for professional engineers in the UK:
- Professional Status For Engineers and Engineering
- The title “Engineer” be legally protected to those with a grade of professional qualification registered with the Engineering Council,
- To include the prefix for European Engineer (EUR ING) on all central and local government forms both paper and on-line where options for prefix are included.
I broadly support all three and have signed them all.
Ironically my attention was drawn to them by an email from the Engineering Council, which actually argued the opposite. An extract from the email is re-produced below.
Among the many hundreds of e-petitions currently to be found on the 10 Downing Street web-site, there are two concerning the status of UK engineers. Both of these call for the epithet ‘engineer’ to become a title protected in law.
While it is true that such protection is afforded to titles like ‘ingenier’ that are used elsewhere in Europe, this is largely because they have a different, less general meaning than engineer. Hardly surprising then that in other English-speaking nations, like the USA and Australia, the situation is the same as in the UK. The word engineer has been in common use in this country for centuries and is widely understood to mean anyone whose work relates to engineering, particularly manufacture or maintenance. Consequently there is no prospect of the engineering profession gaining exclusive rights to the term and thus preventing others from using it.
Even if granting such rights were on the cards, it might be seen by many as undermining individual freedoms, the preservation of which is fundamental to common law in this country. Restricting access to professional practice could also be interpreted as anti-competitive.
Three titles that are of course protected – under ECUK’s Royal Charter – are those of Chartered Engineer, Incorporated Engineer and Engineering Technician. These can only be used by individuals who have satisfied all the requirements for professional registration. Any person falsely claiming to hold one of these awards is pursued through the civil courts.Possibly one way of addressing the petitioners’ concerns would be to encourage more engineers to become professionally registered. In one of the petitions, the desire for legal status seems motivated by a belief that society lacks respect for engineers. If more qualified engineers and technicians were to gain the titles CEng, IEng and EngTech then the profession’s image would only be enhanced.
I have some sympathy for the argument that “engineering” has a broader meaning in the English language than in other European tongues. Nevertheless there is a serious problem here best summed up by Jon Jennings, the proposer of the first of the above petitions:
As a recently qualified Astronautics Engineer and with 8 years experience as a Robotics Engineer I am at a point where due to the lack of respect by the Government, the media in particular the BBC, and society as a whole, I feel there is little point staying in the UK. Car mechanics, Plumbers and Electricians are now commonly referred to as Engineers and Banks now regard Engineers as non/semi skilled.
And that’s actually a serious point. If we are to compete with the likes of China in a technology-driven age we need to maintain our excellence at the forefront of technological development. It isn’t going to happen when so many of the nation’s best graduates from top engineering schools feel they will be better off in the City. Legal recognition of the title might seem trivial but if job titles weren’t important to people’s self-esteem we would not be seeing the phenomenon of job-title inflation in today’s competitive labour market.
Besides, the broader meaning of the word “engineering” is actually the problem. It’s all very well saying that engineers should assert the fact that they are Chartered, Incorporated or whatever, but the average person in the street finds such prefixes meaningless. If it were not for the existing legal protection terms such as architect would have been devalued by job title inflation. If we are prepared to limit personal freedom in job titles for other professions then it should apply to engineering too.
So please, if you’re a British citizen, add your signature to the petitions.
It’s an utter joke how engineers are treated in the UK. A Civil Engineer recently graduated with a First Class degree from a top university stands to earn, oh, £20k per annum? Barely the sort of money any basically-skilled labourer earns. I’m lucky being in Electronic Engineering, but even then the lure of the City is ever-present. It’s quite alarming just how different the situation is in Europe. But then Labour never have been worth anything in building the Country’s intellectual capital.
You can’t pin the blame entirely on Labour. Industries outside the City did not exactly prosper under the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s either. Of course part of the problem was the stagnation of industry as a result of over-extensive nationalisation – but Tory governments (e.g. Macmillan) were responsible for some of that too.
How much is a Civil Engineer with a First Class degree worth? If it’s 20k, and a labourer can earn more, then people studying civil engineering are clearly doing it because they love the subject. Except that they then demonstrate their contempt for their subject by going off to the City. Why should the taxpayer subsidise ANY amount of their tuition if they’re studying civ.eng. solely to work in an i-bank? Their presence in the student numbers simply exaggerates the potential labour pool of civil engineers, depressing salaries.