Alex

 

I’m Chair (as a volunteer, not IET Staff) of the Fellowship Policy Committee, which awards Fellowships, so here is some information to address your question of “what is Fellowship in the context of the IET?”.


First of all, lets establish that Fellow is a Membership grade.  It is also distinct from Honorary Fellowship, which is not dealt with by my Committee but by the Board of Trustees, and as you have noticed only adds a very few people each year.

 

I assume you have read the IET page on applying for Fellowship which details the key expectation for Fellows and outlines the nine criteria, of which any applicant has to meet two or at most three.  Additional details on the nine criteria are in the downloads.   I do not need to repeat all that detail here but I will highlight a few points.

 

Fellowship is peer assessed against the expectation and criteria but the key aspect is “sustained high levels of achievement for five years or more”.  Fellowship is therefore a recognition by industry peers that you are at the top level in your profession.  That is why it is aspired to and sought by many people. In addition, Fellows are encouraged to give back to the profession in various ways and many of our Fellows are enthusiastic volunteers, for example in Registration and Local Networks matters.

 

Something not always realised is that as a membership grade the criteria are established wholly by the IET (some great recent work here by my predecessors) and are unrelated to the Engineering Council.  They also differ to the criteria set by other Engineering Institutions.  As a consequence, Fellows of the IET do not have to be Registered engineers and as we also recognise contributions to engineering by cognate (related) disciplines they do not even have to be engineers, although of course most are.

 

I could add that the profile of a senior engineering or production manager in a large company applying (say) using the leadership and responsibility criteria will be altogether different from an entrepreneur applying (say) using the creativity and enterprise criteria and different again to a senior researcher applying (say) under the insight and experience and innovation criteria.  What brings them all together is that they will be assessed by their peers and we have well over a hundred trained Fellow assessors drawn from all aspects of engineering to ensure a reasonable match.

 

Addressing a few other points, we expect Fellows to apply rather than be nominated because they need to show us some personal commitment and be likely to contribute back to the profession.  Also, for those considering that they may meet our reasonably high standards we have specific Fellow advisors (as we do for Registration, i.e. PRAs) who can provide advice and after that we have a pre-assessment process where further views can be obtained on the likelihood of success of an application without incurring the fee. Contact Fellowship (at) theiet.org for more information.

 

Finally, a few stats as at October this year.  There are about 8.7k Fellows out of about 164k members (c.5.3%).  About 6.9k of the 8.7k are Registered engineers.  We currently add something around 250 a year – there is no limit on numbers other than meeting the criteria and the peer assessment.  We have Fellows in 85 countries.  We only have 172 female Fellows and would like more - but first we need more females in engineering.


I hope this helps.

 

Ian Dufour

Alex

 

I’m Chair (as a volunteer, not IET Staff) of the Fellowship Policy Committee, which awards Fellowships, so here is some information to address your question of “what is Fellowship in the context of the IET?”.


First of all, lets establish that Fellow is a Membership grade.  It is also distinct from Honorary Fellowship, which is not dealt with by my Committee but by the Board of Trustees, and as you have noticed only adds a very few people each year.

 

I assume you have read the IET page on applying for Fellowship which details the key expectation for Fellows and outlines the nine criteria, of which any applicant has to meet two or at most three.  Additional details on the nine criteria are in the downloads.   I do not need to repeat all that detail here but I will highlight a few points.

 

Fellowship is peer assessed against the expectation and criteria but the key aspect is “sustained high levels of achievement for five years or more”.  Fellowship is therefore a recognition by industry peers that you are at the top level in your profession.  That is why it is aspired to and sought by many people. In addition, Fellows are encouraged to give back to the profession in various ways and many of our Fellows are enthusiastic volunteers, for example in Registration and Local Networks matters.

 

Something not always realised is that as a membership grade the criteria are established wholly by the IET (some great recent work here by my predecessors) and are unrelated to the Engineering Council.  They also differ to the criteria set by other Engineering Institutions.  As a consequence, Fellows of the IET do not have to be Registered engineers and as we also recognise contributions to engineering by cognate (related) disciplines they do not even have to be engineers, although of course most are.

 

I could add that the profile of a senior engineering or production manager in a large company applying (say) using the leadership and responsibility criteria will be altogether different from an entrepreneur applying (say) using the creativity and enterprise criteria and different again to a senior researcher applying (say) under the insight and experience and innovation criteria.  What brings them all together is that they will be assessed by their peers and we have well over a hundred trained Fellow assessors drawn from all aspects of engineering to ensure a reasonable match.

 

Addressing a few other points, we expect Fellows to apply rather than be nominated because they need to show us some personal commitment and be likely to contribute back to the profession.  Also, for those considering that they may meet our reasonably high standards we have specific Fellow advisors (as we do for Registration, i.e. PRAs) who can provide advice and after that we have a pre-assessment process where further views can be obtained on the likelihood of success of an application without incurring the fee. Contact Fellowship (at) theiet.org for more information.

 

Finally, a few stats as at October this year.  There are about 8.7k Fellows out of about 164k members (c.5.3%).  About 6.9k of the 8.7k are Registered engineers.  We currently add something around 250 a year – there is no limit on numbers other than meeting the criteria and the peer assessment.  We have Fellows in 85 countries.  We only have 172 female Fellows and would like more - but first we need more females in engineering.


I hope this helps.

 

Ian Dufour