Challenges for Academics Applying for CEng

As usual, I agree with Andy.

Although I haven't PRA'd for any academics and I'm not a IET PRA (I'm an IfSE PRA), I seen a number of applications from people that worked for organisations that were involved in developing engineers (primarily technicians) but not actually delivering what might be considered as a "engineering project".

My view is that it has parallels with those that are engineering managers, who have the C's in bucketfuls but struggle with B's. In the extreme I know cases of engineering managers without any actual formal engineering qualifications (and yes, they were still good engineering managers).

The issue here is that you sometimes have to take a somewhat tangential view on the competencies in order to recognise where your experience matches with them. A good example is C1/C2, which talks about budgets. Budgets don't have to be money, they can be technical budgets such as power, mass, heat, etc. I'm sure someone can identify even more examples.

The question is, what are you engineering as an academic?

We don't only engineer physical products (although many of us do), but we also engineer processes and other systems. I would consider it quite valid to consider the design and delivery of an engineering course as a engineering project.

Thanks Mark, that’s a really helpful perspective. I agree that academics need to take a broader view of the competencies and recognise that we are often engineering systems like courses, assessments, and learning processes. For example, C1 can include managing module resources, staff allocation, and assessment planning, while C2 can be shown through leading module teams, supervising projects, and mentoring staff. The experience is usually there the main challenge is presenting it clearly in an engineering context.

Mark Tickner said:

I know cases of engineering managers without any actual formal engineering qualifications (and yes, they were still good engineering managers).

Often these cases are a symptom of a larger 'Team' based organisation (especially if they have 'systems engineers'). 

In many ways it reminds me of the UK Navy's "The Team Works" motto/slogan for advertising/recruitments. For the want of a nail the battle was lost, implies that being a nail is a core competence for battle winning.

Academics are a similar core of UKU for engineering competence, just as apprenticeships are core...

In the last specific case I came across, it was a team based organisation which had very few people with the title 'systems engineer' (its a whole different discussion about how many people where doing systems engineering and not realising it). It was more a symptom of a company that was open to developing managers into different areas from where they initially trained. Which I'm going to label as potentially a good thing.

Its also something you might see in some SMEs, where it was initially formed of "hands on people", but as the business grew and started to bring in graduates, those original people ended up managing the organisation.

I've often thought that there is a sort of corollary to the Peter Principle - just a competent engineer can, and often does, rise to a level of incompetence in trying to manage people and budgets, equally someone who would be an incompetent engineer (if they ever were one) can be a competent manager. I've known various graduate engineers who had the sense to realise that they were never going to be great engineers, but also realised that they could be good at the areas other engineers weren't good at.  And as someone who, for example, loathes doing project management I bless the fact that there are! It only becomes a problem if the manager believes that they are competent to make technical decisions.

Which reminds me of the CEng applicant I helped to a successful application a few years ago. He joined us as a technician with (IIRC) an HNC, we quickly realised that he was an excellent project manager and, given that we were developing safety critical systems, an excellent manager of the functional safety process. 18 years after he started, he took over my role as head of the R&D team when I moved on - not because he was an R&D engineer but because he knew as much as I did about the process. A few years later when he applied for CEng he'd risen to become global R&D lead for a significant division of the major multinational we'd been working at. It was an interesting and challenging CEng application, we were asked for significant additional evidence for As and Bs which was perfectly reasonable, but in the end he sailed through it - it was clear that he held significant technical accountability for the right engineers making the right decisions, the challenge was demonstrating to others how he'd picked up sufficient technical understanding to get there. (A problem I see a lot with people who've risen within a single organisation.)

Almost the exact counterpart of the original question in the thread: you can have an academic who has huge technical knowledge of an area of engineering but needs to show that they take technical responsibility and accountability for decisions that affect wider society, and you can have the technical leader who carries great responsibility and accountability but needs to show sufficient UK&U to explain why they should be trusted to be there. 

Which in the end is why I see CEng is useful, it shows that the engineer has both of these. 

Which reminds me of the CEng applicant I helped to a successful application a few years ago. He joined us as a technician with (IIRC) an HNC, we quickly realised that he was an excellent project manager and, given that we were developing safety critical systems, an excellent manager of the functional safety process. 18 years after he started, he took over my role as head of the R&D team when I moved on - not because he was an R&D engineer but because he knew as much as I did about the process. A few years later when he applied for CEng he'd risen to become global R&D lead for a significant division of the major multinational we'd been working at. It was an interesting and challenging CEng application, we were asked for significant additional evidence for As and Bs which was perfectly reasonable, but in the end he sailed through it - it was clear that he held significant technical accountability for the right engineers making the right decisions, the challenge was demonstrating to others how he'd picked up sufficient technical understanding to get there. (A problem I see a lot with people who've risen within a single organisation.)

Almost the exact counterpart of the original question in the thread: you can have an academic who has huge technical knowledge of an area of engineering but needs to show that they take technical responsibility and accountability for decisions that affect wider society, and you can have the technical leader who carries great responsibility and accountability but needs to show sufficient UK&U to explain why they should be trusted to be there. 

Which in the end is why I see CEng is useful, it shows that the engineer has both of these. 

The Paul Meenan story (e5 group) is similar (Excellent guy)