I work as a safety assessor, looking at highly safety critical, generally innovative, projects and giving my professional opinion as to whether the organisations involved have managed the risks in a way and to a level that will be acceptable to society.
I don't check every calculation, I don't test the systems. What I am doing is looking for evidence on two points: have the organisations involved followed best practice (the appropriate standards and any other best practice in the environment they are working in), AND are all the staff carrying out the work competent and professional in their roles. Because if someone (deliberately or otherwise) acts negligently it is extremely hard to spot, however good your processes are. There are always engineering tasks, at all levels, where you cannot justify having two engineers / technicians doing the same work in case one of them gets it wrong, and anyway if they are both not competent it won't help!
A fine example is type testing. Someone has to decide and justify which tests are and are not to be carried out for a particular safety argument, someone needs to plan those tests (typically to a standard but adapted to the specific system being tested) and ensure the results are managed correctly into the project documentation, and someone needs to set up the tests according to the plan, operate the equipment, and log the results accurately. I want to be assured that all of those staff will approach their work professionally, so if in those three roles I saw the staff were CEng, IEng, and EngTech that would help reassure me that they had been independently assessed in how they approach their work. Of course it's only a part of the story, I will also want to know that they are competent in the particular field in which they are working, but that tends to be easier to prove.
This is why I am a passionate supporter of IEng and EngTech registrations, and particularly get frustrated that my clients don't push it.
I also support them as a good benchmark for engineers and technicians to be aware of their own competences and areas of improvement. Personally I am very happy to support the requirements of UKSpec as being a sound baseline for the standards an engineer or technician should expect to meet - which can be important when commercial pressures or traditional practices within a company can set different expectations. As, for example, we may have seen recently in the VW emissions case.
HOWEVER, to play devil's advocate for a moment, if I was set the challenge of making a qualitative - let alone a quantitative - judgment of how many lives had been lost through failures in UK engineering which would have been prevented if staff had been IEng and EngTech accredited I couldn't do it. And in fact in my own particular field I suspect that the answer is probably none (since we don't kill very many people anyway). Companies that work in safety critical fields tend to have a safety culture anyway which permeates through them (although there are exceptions), and where they don't it could be argued that it doesn't matter - but again where does this leave the VW case?
But it still feels to me like totally the right thing to do, given that the costs to engineering companies (assuming they cover registrants costs) are really pretty trivial. Not just for safety critical or high reliability engineering, but just generally to improve standards. I do believe that any employer that made it a condition that their staff (at all levels) became registered, and provided support to train them through this, would see an improvement in their output quality and efficiency.
I work as a safety assessor, looking at highly safety critical, generally innovative, projects and giving my professional opinion as to whether the organisations involved have managed the risks in a way and to a level that will be acceptable to society.
I don't check every calculation, I don't test the systems. What I am doing is looking for evidence on two points: have the organisations involved followed best practice (the appropriate standards and any other best practice in the environment they are working in), AND are all the staff carrying out the work competent and professional in their roles. Because if someone (deliberately or otherwise) acts negligently it is extremely hard to spot, however good your processes are. There are always engineering tasks, at all levels, where you cannot justify having two engineers / technicians doing the same work in case one of them gets it wrong, and anyway if they are both not competent it won't help!
A fine example is type testing. Someone has to decide and justify which tests are and are not to be carried out for a particular safety argument, someone needs to plan those tests (typically to a standard but adapted to the specific system being tested) and ensure the results are managed correctly into the project documentation, and someone needs to set up the tests according to the plan, operate the equipment, and log the results accurately. I want to be assured that all of those staff will approach their work professionally, so if in those three roles I saw the staff were CEng, IEng, and EngTech that would help reassure me that they had been independently assessed in how they approach their work. Of course it's only a part of the story, I will also want to know that they are competent in the particular field in which they are working, but that tends to be easier to prove.
This is why I am a passionate supporter of IEng and EngTech registrations, and particularly get frustrated that my clients don't push it.
I also support them as a good benchmark for engineers and technicians to be aware of their own competences and areas of improvement. Personally I am very happy to support the requirements of UKSpec as being a sound baseline for the standards an engineer or technician should expect to meet - which can be important when commercial pressures or traditional practices within a company can set different expectations. As, for example, we may have seen recently in the VW emissions case.
HOWEVER, to play devil's advocate for a moment, if I was set the challenge of making a qualitative - let alone a quantitative - judgment of how many lives had been lost through failures in UK engineering which would have been prevented if staff had been IEng and EngTech accredited I couldn't do it. And in fact in my own particular field I suspect that the answer is probably none (since we don't kill very many people anyway). Companies that work in safety critical fields tend to have a safety culture anyway which permeates through them (although there are exceptions), and where they don't it could be argued that it doesn't matter - but again where does this leave the VW case?
But it still feels to me like totally the right thing to do, given that the costs to engineering companies (assuming they cover registrants costs) are really pretty trivial. Not just for safety critical or high reliability engineering, but just generally to improve standards. I do believe that any employer that made it a condition that their staff (at all levels) became registered, and provided support to train them through this, would see an improvement in their output quality and efficiency.
