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

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..." 

Wow, genuinely impressed with your the array of instruments you’ve mastered! You must have a real passion for music, that’s some versatility as a musician.As for me, I’ve been a devoted guitarist for 37 years, and although these days I’m strumming on a modest £10 charity shop acoustic, the love for the instrument hasn’t waned. Keep on rocking ! and squeezing those boxes!

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

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay

I have been MIET on and off over the years. The application process for CEng does seem a bit daunting. A few of my colleagues who are registered were on Graduate Schemes with larger corporations straight out of university. These seem to have a more clear path and development plan in place. I have recently started filling in the Career manager and UK-Spec self assessment. Post university I have about 9 years work experience with the last four years being contract work as consultant CQV Engineer on large scale Pharma CapEx projects.

I feel like a lot of my development as an engineer was during the early years of my career and I kinda of missed the window for applying; when all the achievements and development were still fresh in my head. Career wise I think I am coasting moving from contract to contract and slowly increasing hourly rate. It seems for CEng the expectation is you need to be in lead roles. My accountability diagram has me at the bottom reporting into clients project managers. 

On a side note a lot of the older consultants I work with are CEng registered but its not something they even talk about or put on signatures. Its usually right at the bottom of their Linkedin. But I am sure it comes up when negotiating rates.

Can I even apply for CEng based on my BEng(H) EEE and MSc EEE both being marked as CEng(Requires Further Learning)? Does MBA count on the further learning?

I have reached out to two local professional registration advisors from the IET website with no response.