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Time for licenced Engineers?

Former Community Member
Former Community Member
As a result of a discussion within a Linkedin group. I had originally raised the issue of the EC UK or IET legally licencing Engineers and had agreed to bring this discussion from Linkedin to the IET members in an appropriate community for a frank and open debate.

​The circumstances surrounding this discussion was the tragedy of Grenfell Towers and my personal observation that some of the alleged decision makers, had no technical qualifications to make decisions on public safety. I am wondering how far the inquiry will go to reveal that issue. 

​

As I currently work in Canada we do have an act of law governing the conduct of its licenced Engineers and this makes the Engineer have some higher degree of responsibility for public safety.


​Questions

1)    Given the impact of Grenfell, does EC(UK) have to now start considering licencing? What are the perceived hurdles to achieve this?

​2)    If not. What can we do within our profession to improve pubic safety with an objective to prevent another 'Grenfell' ?


I am ​Interested to get IET members responses.

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  • 0
    Reminds me of the time in a past company when I got a phone call from a board meeting: "we've just realised we've got no KPIs for Engineering, you need to give us something right now that you can be measured on". (I suggested we thought about what would be useful to measure rather than just having KPIs to be seen to have KPIs, but that was seen as a silly suggestion.) One suggestion was that we should measure how many Engineering Change Records we had implemented each week, when I asked whether the right answer would be a high number (because we were doing lots of work)  or a low number (because we had made very few mistakes) the phone finally went silent and I could get back on with some work...


    KPIs can be useful, but too many business implement the wrong KPIs, and then believe they are telling them something useful - right until the business goes bust.


    Sorry, way off topic smiley But it did amuse me.


    RAIB probably are measured on the number of their recommendations, but I do still like their reports. The report on the Croydon Tram accident https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a2a6289ed915d458e4214ba/R182017_181024_Sandilands_v2.pdf  I'd recommend to anyone entering the world of safety engineering as an exemplar of quite how many different contributory factors can lead to a horrific and avoidable accident. I was thinking about this when writing my earlier post: when the report was first released the press picked up on "the driver fell asleep" - the grossest of oversimplifications. What was interesting, in the context of this thread, is that despite the numerous engineering issues that related to the root causes and severity for this incident the only competence recommendation (that I can see at a brief re-read) relates to the competence of the managers supervising drivers to ensure they are managing workload and rest periods to best practice. So should managers be licensed?


    Cheers,


    Andy
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  • 0
    Reminds me of the time in a past company when I got a phone call from a board meeting: "we've just realised we've got no KPIs for Engineering, you need to give us something right now that you can be measured on". (I suggested we thought about what would be useful to measure rather than just having KPIs to be seen to have KPIs, but that was seen as a silly suggestion.) One suggestion was that we should measure how many Engineering Change Records we had implemented each week, when I asked whether the right answer would be a high number (because we were doing lots of work)  or a low number (because we had made very few mistakes) the phone finally went silent and I could get back on with some work...


    KPIs can be useful, but too many business implement the wrong KPIs, and then believe they are telling them something useful - right until the business goes bust.


    Sorry, way off topic smiley But it did amuse me.


    RAIB probably are measured on the number of their recommendations, but I do still like their reports. The report on the Croydon Tram accident https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a2a6289ed915d458e4214ba/R182017_181024_Sandilands_v2.pdf  I'd recommend to anyone entering the world of safety engineering as an exemplar of quite how many different contributory factors can lead to a horrific and avoidable accident. I was thinking about this when writing my earlier post: when the report was first released the press picked up on "the driver fell asleep" - the grossest of oversimplifications. What was interesting, in the context of this thread, is that despite the numerous engineering issues that related to the root causes and severity for this incident the only competence recommendation (that I can see at a brief re-read) relates to the competence of the managers supervising drivers to ensure they are managing workload and rest periods to best practice. So should managers be licensed?


    Cheers,


    Andy
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