Hi Joshua,

Joshua Jones said:

When looking at graduate schemes and jobs, not many seem to explicity mention that you need to be IET accredited

I'm surprised (and quite interested) if you found any that did need you to have an IET accredited degree. Let's be quite clear:

• You do NOT need an accredited degree to become a Chartered Engineer (or Incorporated Engineer). By the way, you do NOT need a master's either. Most CEng applicants don't have a Masters, and I suspect that most don't have an accredited degree either - I'm sure a large number don't.
• If any employers want to see an accredited degree, they are (at least in my experience) very rare.
• There are almost certainly more engineers working in industry without an accredited degree than there are with.
• What company interviewers want to know (and I've been recruiting engineers for over 35 years know) is what you've actually learned in your degree.
• As you've been doing, look at job adverts, they'll tell you what you ACTUALLY need to get a job (not what the university would like to sell you).

OK, so that's the good news.

Your bigger problem is that presumably your degree grade is going to be affected? You might find that does cause you a problem getting the first choice of jobs. The problem is that for popular jobs the recruitment department gets so many applications that they have to find a simple way of rejecting a load of them to get it to a manageable number to look through, so they just draw a line under 1st, or 2.1, or wherever they need. Which is really annoying. Often the trick is to apply to smaller companies where there's more chance that an actual engineer will see your CV first rather than a number-crunching recruitment person.

But definitely don't panic.

Hope that helps,

Andy

(IET volunteer professional registration advisor)

Hi Joshua,

Joshua Jones said:

When looking at graduate schemes and jobs, not many seem to explicity mention that you need to be IET accredited

I'm surprised (and quite interested) if you found any that did need you to have an IET accredited degree. Let's be quite clear:

• You do NOT need an accredited degree to become a Chartered Engineer (or Incorporated Engineer). By the way, you do NOT need a master's either. Most CEng applicants don't have a Masters, and I suspect that most don't have an accredited degree either - I'm sure a large number don't.
• If any employers want to see an accredited degree, they are (at least in my experience) very rare.
• There are almost certainly more engineers working in industry without an accredited degree than there are with.
• What company interviewers want to know (and I've been recruiting engineers for over 35 years know) is what you've actually learned in your degree.
• As you've been doing, look at job adverts, they'll tell you what you ACTUALLY need to get a job (not what the university would like to sell you).

OK, so that's the good news.

Your bigger problem is that presumably your degree grade is going to be affected? You might find that does cause you a problem getting the first choice of jobs. The problem is that for popular jobs the recruitment department gets so many applications that they have to find a simple way of rejecting a load of them to get it to a manageable number to look through, so they just draw a line under 1st, or 2.1, or wherever they need. Which is really annoying. Often the trick is to apply to smaller companies where there's more chance that an actual engineer will see your CV first rather than a number-crunching recruitment person.

But definitely don't panic.

Hope that helps,

Andy

(IET volunteer professional registration advisor)

Morning Andy, 

Thank you for providing Joshua with this very useful information. 

Kara

No problem Kara, I'm so used to providing that answer it almost writes itself! 

I guess it's also worth adding this link to the excellent mythbuster page, "Time and time again, our Professional Registration volunteers hear from candidates who’ve been put off applying for a professional status and improving their career prospects. Here we address some common myths, so you can put aside your concerns and apply.":

https://www.theiet.org/career/professional-registration/getting-help-with-your-application/11-professional-registration-myths

I do wonder if some universities might slightly over-aggressively "sell" their accredited courses, it's hard to tell, but equally it may be students mis-interpreting the message.

Thanks,

Andy