Honorary Fellowship

Mehmood,

 

To your specific question I think without checking all their individual credentials against yours that the answer is no. But they haven’t all been CEng or FIET either. Clearly the Board of Trustees have spread a wider net which seems very sensible to me. Honorary Fellowships are few in number, but the numbers of Fellows are quite substantial and drawn from various backgrounds based on the criteria set out. Unsurprisingly there is some correlation with CEng but the two are not linked. There are also quite a number of Fellows under 40.

 

Below is some informal advice that I received from one of our Honorary Fellows in 2011 that I feel deserves reading. I have kept it anonymous because it wasn’t intended for publication.

 
I have always thought of the categories of registration as related to different sets of skills each deserving recognition and status. An Incorporated Engineer I would expect to be knowledgeable about specific engineering products or services, processes and machinery and able to explain things about them to people within his or her engineering organisation; I would expect them to be “streetwise” and able to supervise others confidently. An engineering or ICT technician I would expect to be a proficient user of particular tools, have patience and be thoroughly knowledgeable about the operation of a particular process or machine. A Chartered Engineer should be able at justifying engineering decisions to anyone especially themselves, be prepared to deliberate and research, set out an argument and work confidently in unfamiliar situations.

 
Because the skills required are different, anyone in one category does not automatically have the skills for another. Thus movement in any direction requires the honing of unrehearsed skills or their acquisition. Progress for an individual can be in any direction! It means Incorporated Engineers are not apprentice Chartered Engineers and to see them as such is to remove an important distinction. Nevertheless we should recognise that a competent Incorporated Engineer can through education and experience gain the skills of a Chartered Engineer so being an Incorporated Engineer is not a disqualification for later registration as a Chartered Engineer. Similarly being a Chartered Engineer is not a disqualification for becoming, with appropriate skill development, an Engineering Technician.

 
It is the case that intellectual skills of deliberation and argumentation of a Chartered Engineer demand a longer time than the intellectual skills of an Engineering technician, however the technician has to develop “know how” for which an academic setting is not necessarily appropriate. And it is the case that there are some commonalities in the intellectual skill development of all categories but at some point they each go in a different direction to develop different portfolios.

 
We should be careful of the metaphors we use: words like “level” imply a hierarchy, “grade (as in “registration grade” ) implies a scale, “class” (at least for the English) implies a hierarchy, “progress” and “progressive” imply a forward movement and hence going the other way is backward!      

 

Mehmood,

 

To your specific question I think without checking all their individual credentials against yours that the answer is no. But they haven’t all been CEng or FIET either. Clearly the Board of Trustees have spread a wider net which seems very sensible to me. Honorary Fellowships are few in number, but the numbers of Fellows are quite substantial and drawn from various backgrounds based on the criteria set out. Unsurprisingly there is some correlation with CEng but the two are not linked. There are also quite a number of Fellows under 40.

 

Below is some informal advice that I received from one of our Honorary Fellows in 2011 that I feel deserves reading. I have kept it anonymous because it wasn’t intended for publication.

 
I have always thought of the categories of registration as related to different sets of skills each deserving recognition and status. An Incorporated Engineer I would expect to be knowledgeable about specific engineering products or services, processes and machinery and able to explain things about them to people within his or her engineering organisation; I would expect them to be “streetwise” and able to supervise others confidently. An engineering or ICT technician I would expect to be a proficient user of particular tools, have patience and be thoroughly knowledgeable about the operation of a particular process or machine. A Chartered Engineer should be able at justifying engineering decisions to anyone especially themselves, be prepared to deliberate and research, set out an argument and work confidently in unfamiliar situations.

 
Because the skills required are different, anyone in one category does not automatically have the skills for another. Thus movement in any direction requires the honing of unrehearsed skills or their acquisition. Progress for an individual can be in any direction! It means Incorporated Engineers are not apprentice Chartered Engineers and to see them as such is to remove an important distinction. Nevertheless we should recognise that a competent Incorporated Engineer can through education and experience gain the skills of a Chartered Engineer so being an Incorporated Engineer is not a disqualification for later registration as a Chartered Engineer. Similarly being a Chartered Engineer is not a disqualification for becoming, with appropriate skill development, an Engineering Technician.

 
It is the case that intellectual skills of deliberation and argumentation of a Chartered Engineer demand a longer time than the intellectual skills of an Engineering technician, however the technician has to develop “know how” for which an academic setting is not necessarily appropriate. And it is the case that there are some commonalities in the intellectual skill development of all categories but at some point they each go in a different direction to develop different portfolios.

 
We should be careful of the metaphors we use: words like “level” imply a hierarchy, “grade (as in “registration grade” ) implies a scale, “class” (at least for the English) implies a hierarchy, “progress” and “progressive” imply a forward movement and hence going the other way is backward!