Being professionally registered, I won't vote, but thinking back about my own experience, I put it off for years because it was very daunting, even though I had been working in responsible positions with complex systems in some of the country's leading infrastructure projects leading to that point. The IEE was a very different place to the IET, but I guess it still looks like a big hill to climb.

The best advice I can give to anyone thinking of starting the process is speak to a Professional Registration Advisor, who will help take the veil of the mystical process, tell you what to expect based on your experience, and hopefully give you some advice on how to prepare for the interview.

Your message contained a reference to Grenfell (Tower Fire) and indirectly to Dame Judith Hackitt proposals to fix the construction industry.

What is the name of the UK law (so I can review it), that disallowed people who are CEng, IEng and EngTech from being considered qualified.

How did it pass muster at the IET - did  Dr. Joanna Cox (IET Head of Policy) approve it?

On another topic mentioned in another of your messages- Has the IET obtained a new extension of the Royal Charter from your new King?

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay Florida 

AMK said:

Could you share whether attaining the status of Chartered Engineer has provided tangible benefits in your career , or was it primarily pursued as a personal achievement akin to my own aspirations.

Initially for the latter reason, I have a pretty awful degree and I thought being CEng might distract recruiters from that. I don't actually think that works, recruiters who are only worried about tick boxes for qualifications won't get distracted from them by anything, and engineers involved in recruitment are (quite rightly) usually more interested in actual track record. Still, since my employers were paying for it it was worth a try.

However, nowadays the first part applies - it is a requirement for my job that we are Chartered. Why? Because I work in a consultancy, and it's part of our credibility that those at Principal level have been accredited by a third party as showing professional competence. I possibly could have got my first consultancy job without being Chartered (I possibly could have got it just on my industry reputation), but possibly not, and in any case they would have needed me to get it asap.

Peter Brooks said:

What is the name of the UK law (so I can review it), that disallowed people who are CEng, IEng and EngTech from being considered qualified.

Hi,

I don't think that's quite what Graham said? But I'll admit I didn't know these ever were considered a "qualification". If they were I'll admit that (and this is very rare for me!) I'd have to disagree with Graham, I don't think they should count as a "qualification". My IEE certificate says that I am a "Chartered Electrical Engineer", but I do not have any competence in electrical engineering and should not be considered qualified to do any electrical engineering work. Since the broadening into the IET this is even more true, CEng (or IEng or EngTech) doesn't give any indication of your competence to do any particular piece of engineering, what it does (hopefully) do is indicate that what ever your skills and knowledge are you will apply them professionally. And that really is quite useful.

P.S. I'm pretty competent up to 50V ac and 75V dc, above that I don't want to know...it bites!

Thanks,

Andy

One piece of safety advice about playing around with voltages over 75 V dc - Keep one hand in your pocket .

The first place I worked at in the UK the electricians were not issued with meters. In order to check if a circuit was live (440 volts) they would wet the tips of two adjacent fingers then touch the bare wires or terminals, to see if they experience tingling. 

Peter 

In case anyone is tempted to try...

I'd expect a tingle even at 75V. I'd expect to burn away chunks of finger at 220 or 440 between adjacent fingers, indeed  while at school I managed a mains 230V shock that left impressive burn marks in my hands and got me the afternoon off. (school play and stage wiring....)

A dry skin brushing contact may be 'high resistance', but is often more than enough  enough for muscular convulsions - please do not lick any body parts you may enliven.

A single point touch of 240, completing the circuit through the capacitance of the body to ground, maybe aided and abetted by slightly conductive footwear from sweaty feet, is quite enough for sensation - and if there is any risk at all, use the back of the hand, so the muscle spasm disconnects, rather than makes you grip tighter.

I think they were probably winding you up a bit.

Mike.

Hi Peter, just to clarify but Dr Joanna Cox is not the Head of Policy at the IET? And King Charles is indeed  Patron of the IET as recently reported in IET Member News: https://www.theiet.org/membership/member-news/member-news-2024/member-news-april-to-june-2024/hm-the-king-becomes-iet-patron . 

Peter Brooks said:

What is the name of the UK law (so I can review it), that disallowed people who are CEng, IEng and EngTech from being considered qualified.

I believe the Apprenticeship, Skills and Learning Act is the one that brought in regulation of qualifications: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/22/contents

(although some colleagues in the Education sector may know better).

Legislation clarified what "qualifications" were, and around that time, CEng, IEng and EngTech became "protected titles" by EU legislation (rather than just Royal Charter).

So, it's a little bit complicated.

There's also the distinction regards "qualifications" from a legal perspective - perhaps better-termed "credentials" (given the regulation of "qualifications") of an expert witness, for which Professional Registration is of course wholly appropriate.

The IEE (apologies using this acronym, but it's a "back in the day", so no reflection on current IET) used to talk about CEng as a "qualification" ... no longer is that language used to the best of my knowledge.

I seem to remember at the time, C&GLI provided a "read-across" Masters-equivalent qualification that could be claimed by those holding CEng (for a fee), for those CEng who did not have a cognate Masters Degree. I'm not sure if that's still possible to register for, if you obtain CEng without an accredited Masters?

I'm not convinced that our titles are covered by EU legislation these days. However, they still are covered by the Engineering Councils Royal Charter.

However, risking kicking a wasps nest here...

I think its right that CEng is not considered a qualification in its own right, because it is more than that. To be CEng (or any of the professional registration categories) you need to have a suitable qualification (or demonstrated equivalency), but you also need to have demonstrated competency.

There may be a few people who preferred the old pre-UK-SPEC time served system.. But even with SARTOR there was competencies to be met. My knowledge does not go back pre-SARTOR I'm afraid.

Qualifications are an interesting area - there are plenty of organisations that will offer you qualifications of dubious value (and not getting into mickey mouse degrees, for which Classics at Oxford must surely be one of those). The fact the institutions act as third party independent accreditors of educational course should mean those courses maintain a level of quality. This doesn't mean they are necessarily the best courses, there could be quite possibly a non-accredited qualification that is better then an accredited one.

I'm not convinced that you can have the accreditation of the qualification and the delivery of the qualification within the same organisation without some impact to the quality. But this is the same as trying to keep your internal audit as far away as possible from engineering delivery organisationally. We have all worked for those organisations where the delivery director tells the QA to test it as fast as possible so it can be shipped.

Like Andy above, my CEng is old enough that I could possibly claim to be a Chartered Electrical Engineer. I won't. I'm a Systems Engineer. In the same way, I currently work in Civil Engineering and I could claim a CSCS card - but I wouldn't engage in that illusion either.

And this leads onto the issue with CEng, my MEng in Electronics will tell you that I probably know a thing or two about electronics. However, my CEng doesn't tell you anything about which area I have expertise. You can probably draw the conclusion that I can do a level of project management and know how to learn. But most of all, I know how to fill in documentation!

Even though its more domain specific, even my CSEP doesn't tell which area of Systems Engineering I have expertise in. You could assume that I had a reasonable grounding in most areas of the discipline though as i would of had to pass the ASEP test.

So no, these are not qualifications. You need the context behind them to work out if I am SQEP for the specific area or not.

Hello Lisa. My Grenfell Tower fire file from early 2018 shows the IET sponsored a couple of special industry wide meetings. Dame Judith Hackitt was not invited - however for the first she was on vacation in the US. The IET/HPS event was called "Hi-Rise Building. A safer future through technology", and was held at the IET Headquarters. 

My records show that Dr. Joanna Cox was identified as the IET Head of policy at that time.

A couple of points, I ran tests on my own hands (that are fairly dry) during this same time period and came up with 80 volts dc.

Again at the same approximate place/time a newbie engineer reached inside a breaker box with 240 volt ac and seriously damaged one of his hands.

I observed an old electrician use the wet finger approach when power had been lost within a manufacturing department. He was not even aware i was watching. One thing I did not see was what boots he was wearing (could be thick rubber insulation).

For those too young to remember electronic valves (tubes) used 250 volts on the plate((anode) with a cap on the top connection. Tubes had to be aged before testing and sometimes this involved adding the 250 volts dc manually to the top connection half way through the process.

I actually worked outside special cage  test equipment with voltages going up to 1 million volts.

I also worked in life testing products with open (no cover) TV receivers (5-10 KV).

Peter Brooks

A couple of points, I ran tests on my own hands (that are fairly dry) during this same time period and came up with 80 volts dc.

Again at the same approximate place/time a newbie engineer reached inside a breaker box with 240 volt ac and seriously damaged one of his hands.

I observed an old electrician use the wet finger approach when power had been lost within a manufacturing department. He was not even aware i was watching. One thing I did not see was what boots he was wearing (could be thick rubber insulation).

For those too young to remember electronic valves (tubes) used 250 volts on the plate((anode) with a cap on the top connection. Tubes had to be aged before testing and sometimes this involved adding the 250 volts dc manually to the top connection half way through the process.

I actually worked outside special cage  test equipment with voltages going up to 1 million volts.

I also worked in life testing products with open (no cover) TV receivers (5-10 KV).

Peter Brooks

And I have done a fair amount with vacuum electronics and high energy too, and still have some responsibilities in that direction nowadays. Now there is no question the presence of an HT teaches you to be respectful when working covers off, but most of the top cap valves I have met, it was the grid on top, and in a dead receiver, putting a finger on the grid and listening for hum reaching the speaker was a legit test of the audio stages. It must be said though you had to know the designs well, you don't do that twice on a QV06-50 for example (!) and  there is at least one transmitter valve with 2 top cap anodes for push pull RF generation whose no. escapes me for now, and also as you noted, the old line output stages in TVs (PL509/ 519 etc) were all live cap - one of the last bits to be transistorised  for many makes, as it doubled up as a switched mode power supply for most of the rest of the set.

Please don't think I'm having a pop at your earlier post, I'm just advising anyone of the 'transistors-only' current limited generation that finger test are not something to try lightly. Single point contact, perhaps was possible, but not nowadays.

M.

As I often mention, my approach to the qualifications etc thing very much comes from my day job as an ISA (and also my experiences in recruitment): I want to see that engineers are competent in the field their working in, typically through qualifications plus specific experience, AND will act professionally, which can be through professional registration plus track record. Hence different but complementary. This leads on to the fact that personally I tend to find the "Masters equivalent" thing a bit of a red herring when it comes to subject knowledge, but more interesting in the fact that, certainly in my Masters, the importance of identifying and referencing evidence was hammered home much better than it was in my Bachelors - which is part of the professionalism side.

So sort of back to the point of the thread, engineering qualifications don't tell employers or assessors anything about how well you apply your knowledge, whether you're going to share that knowledge effectively with the rest of the team, whether you're going to use it with an awareness of business needs, whether you're going to consider the ethics of your work, etc etc. So if engineers feel that they need to show third party accreditation of this stuff (which e.g. in my world of safety critical systems they often do) then professional registration is a useful way of doing this. 

Re finger tingles, as trainee BBC radio studio maintenance engineers we also had to learn TV repair (CRT style of course in those days). I vividly remember that lab as we all superstitiously knew someone was going to get a belt - and sure enough there was a yelp as one of us leapt backwards at high speed. Oddly we all relaxed after that, and sure enough none of the rest of us did get one.

The last one I got was a few weeks ago at the Repair Cafe I volunteer at. It was a DV player with transformerless power supply, so an input capacitor fed directly from the rectified mains. That was annoying - it had been unplugged for quite a while but I still should have known better. We had less sympathy when a few minutes later one of my co-repairers (a very experienced, and very good, ex-services technician) got a belt off the same capacitor after seeing me get mine...

Anyway better not go down that rabbit hole too far...subject for another thread, best electric shock story!

How about the good old days in the UK when we got  240 volts DC directly from some Power companies.(North of the Thames was AC and south of the Thames was DC)

In those days they sold audio amps that could be used on either 240  volts AC or DC.

One had to be very careful if one tried to create a stereo system by using two them in parallel.

Peter

Funnily enough, another thread that's running on here at the moment (which or two of us on this thread are involved in...) made me think to dig out my valve guitar amp last night for a bit of fun, sadly I tried it again just now and it suddenly stopped working so I'm going to have to dive in and fix it - on with the rubber gloves and get the defibrillator ready..."there be dragons..." 

Were the output tubes KT66's in a push pull configuration ? I used to work on them.

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay

Peter Brooks said:

Were the output tubes KT66's in a push pull configuration ?

Nothing so sophisticated - a single 6V6! The nice thing about valve guitar amps is that distortion isn't a problem, it's the whole point...