What is Fellowship?

Alex

 

Moving now to your question about peers and “what determines an appropriate match to a particular applicant and upon what basis?”.  I’ll cover this in terms of Fellowship and Registration with the latter setting the scene for the former but if you want to follow up anything about Registration you need a new Forum topic as it will be off-topic on this thread.

 

There are four relevant differences between Registration and Fellowship: 1.  Registration requirements are set by the Engineering Council and operated under licence by the IET.  Procedures have to be agreed and are audited both internally by the IET Audit Committee (QAC) and externally by the Engineering Council. Fellowship requirements are set by the IET and audited internally by the QAC.  2.  There is a difference in scale: Registration has more than ten times as many applicants going through the process each year as Fellowship and has correspondingly many more trained volunteers to support it.  3.  Registration is qualifications and competence based.  Fellowship is criteria based.  4.  An interview is mandatory for Registration (albeit IEng/CEng only) but only about 10% of Fellows are interviewed.  These differences do not preclude using common workflow processes for administrative convenience, and indeed QAC has encouraged it: this is probably where you perceive similarities.

 

The relevant parts of the Engineering Council Registration Code of Practice are sections 11 and 13.  Section 11 says: “The Professional Review shall include two components: a review of documentary evidence and an interview”.  Extracts of section 13 say “Both elements of the Professional Review … shall be conducted by two suitably qualified and trained assessors.  They shall be registrants at or above the registration category in which the applicant is seeking registration, with at least one having substantial experience in the relevant engineering discipline.”  As an advocate of IEng I take some exception to the word “above” but that is for another Forum thread too.

 

The word “peer” does not appear in the Engineering Council document but the intent is clear from the above – it is at its heart a peer review process against certain standards.  In the IET, peer implicitly also means volunteer.

 

The basis for “matching” between applicant and assessor/interviewer is built into the process and the training of both staff and volunteers.  It is in part a hierarchy: the five IET sectors (built environment; design and production; energy; information and communication; transport) followed by a number of volunteer panels, for example armed forces; IT software, computing and control; manufacturing and production, and so on.  In addition, each trained volunteer supplies a record of their employment experience and their fields of engineering.  For selecting volunteers for validating qualifications and what we call underpinning knowledge and understanding the panels and volunteer records are the main basis for this.  These aspects are cleared before an interview by the appropriate panel for the applicant.  Interviewers are drawn from an even bigger pool of trained volunteers to give an even greater spread of expertise.  Selection is therefore based on process (records of a volunteer’s sector/panel/experience etc.) combined with the personal knowledge of both staff and volunteers.

 

Whilst the reason for using a peer is probably self-evident at the technical assessment level, you might wonder why an interviewer using a structured competence-based process needs to be a peer at all.  In theory, any trained interviewer ought to be able to do it.  That’s probably true for competences C, D and E but in practice competences A and B do call for some interpretation and benchmarking: as an example, creativity, innovation and technical leadership mean different things in the railway and nuclear industries to those in telecommunications, electronics or software apps (thank goodness!).

 

Fellowship is criteria-based and the judgement about sustained high levels of achievement is best determined by peers with industry sector knowledge. Peer matching is on similar principles to that described earlier.

 

It is a general rule of human endeavour that the top people in any area know each other. It is the same for engineering Fellows.  (Also that excellence is recognised - why else are there achievement awards as a form of peer recognition? e.g. think sports, entertainment and media but also see previous post re. IET).  Registration volunteers have to withdraw if they know the applicant but this is not as important in Fellowship: you would expect the top people to know each other anyway.  This varies by sector: some are large, others so small that everyone knows each other anyway: in such cases one assessor may deliberately be from another field.

 

The aim throughout is fairness, objectivity, transparency and consistency.  That is why we have published standards for qualifications, competences and criteria.  For registration applicants, there are usually 7-10 volunteer peers involved and for Fellowship 3-6, all in conjunction with experienced staff. This eliminates bias from any one assessor (or interviewer).   It is quite an achievement to have a workflow process that treats every applicant as an individual across such broad areas.


Ian

Alex

 

Moving now to your question about peers and “what determines an appropriate match to a particular applicant and upon what basis?”.  I’ll cover this in terms of Fellowship and Registration with the latter setting the scene for the former but if you want to follow up anything about Registration you need a new Forum topic as it will be off-topic on this thread.

 

There are four relevant differences between Registration and Fellowship: 1.  Registration requirements are set by the Engineering Council and operated under licence by the IET.  Procedures have to be agreed and are audited both internally by the IET Audit Committee (QAC) and externally by the Engineering Council. Fellowship requirements are set by the IET and audited internally by the QAC.  2.  There is a difference in scale: Registration has more than ten times as many applicants going through the process each year as Fellowship and has correspondingly many more trained volunteers to support it.  3.  Registration is qualifications and competence based.  Fellowship is criteria based.  4.  An interview is mandatory for Registration (albeit IEng/CEng only) but only about 10% of Fellows are interviewed.  These differences do not preclude using common workflow processes for administrative convenience, and indeed QAC has encouraged it: this is probably where you perceive similarities.

 

The relevant parts of the Engineering Council Registration Code of Practice are sections 11 and 13.  Section 11 says: “The Professional Review shall include two components: a review of documentary evidence and an interview”.  Extracts of section 13 say “Both elements of the Professional Review … shall be conducted by two suitably qualified and trained assessors.  They shall be registrants at or above the registration category in which the applicant is seeking registration, with at least one having substantial experience in the relevant engineering discipline.”  As an advocate of IEng I take some exception to the word “above” but that is for another Forum thread too.

 

The word “peer” does not appear in the Engineering Council document but the intent is clear from the above – it is at its heart a peer review process against certain standards.  In the IET, peer implicitly also means volunteer.

 

The basis for “matching” between applicant and assessor/interviewer is built into the process and the training of both staff and volunteers.  It is in part a hierarchy: the five IET sectors (built environment; design and production; energy; information and communication; transport) followed by a number of volunteer panels, for example armed forces; IT software, computing and control; manufacturing and production, and so on.  In addition, each trained volunteer supplies a record of their employment experience and their fields of engineering.  For selecting volunteers for validating qualifications and what we call underpinning knowledge and understanding the panels and volunteer records are the main basis for this.  These aspects are cleared before an interview by the appropriate panel for the applicant.  Interviewers are drawn from an even bigger pool of trained volunteers to give an even greater spread of expertise.  Selection is therefore based on process (records of a volunteer’s sector/panel/experience etc.) combined with the personal knowledge of both staff and volunteers.

 

Whilst the reason for using a peer is probably self-evident at the technical assessment level, you might wonder why an interviewer using a structured competence-based process needs to be a peer at all.  In theory, any trained interviewer ought to be able to do it.  That’s probably true for competences C, D and E but in practice competences A and B do call for some interpretation and benchmarking: as an example, creativity, innovation and technical leadership mean different things in the railway and nuclear industries to those in telecommunications, electronics or software apps (thank goodness!).

 

Fellowship is criteria-based and the judgement about sustained high levels of achievement is best determined by peers with industry sector knowledge. Peer matching is on similar principles to that described earlier.

 

It is a general rule of human endeavour that the top people in any area know each other. It is the same for engineering Fellows.  (Also that excellence is recognised - why else are there achievement awards as a form of peer recognition? e.g. think sports, entertainment and media but also see previous post re. IET).  Registration volunteers have to withdraw if they know the applicant but this is not as important in Fellowship: you would expect the top people to know each other anyway.  This varies by sector: some are large, others so small that everyone knows each other anyway: in such cases one assessor may deliberately be from another field.

 

The aim throughout is fairness, objectivity, transparency and consistency.  That is why we have published standards for qualifications, competences and criteria.  For registration applicants, there are usually 7-10 volunteer peers involved and for Fellowship 3-6, all in conjunction with experienced staff. This eliminates bias from any one assessor (or interviewer).   It is quite an achievement to have a workflow process that treats every applicant as an individual across such broad areas.


Ian