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Professionally registered engineers report higher earnings

Former Community Member over 6 years ago

Professionally registered engineers report higher earnings

"Average salaries are higher among professionally registered engineers in all areas of industry, according to a 2018 Salary Survey produced by The Engineer. The mean average salary among professionally registered respondents was over £8,000 a year higher."

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/professional-registration-engineer-salary/

Salary survey here

Moshe Waserman BEET, MCGI, CEng MBCS, MIET

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0 Roy Bowdler over 6 years ago

Hi Lee, I have only just found time to answer your earlier questions from a few posts ago.   what the average age of someone obtaining IEng was… the lack of clarity as to what exactly difference was… What is an "apprentice degree".

The most important thing is to focus on what works best for your career!

In 2017 the average age of a new registrant for both IEng & CEng categories was 37. The average age of an existing registrant is around 55. 2.3% of registrants are under 30, 8.7% under 35 and 17% under 40. For context 26% of registrants are aged over 65.

I gained IEng at the age of 27, although at that time a “minimum age of 23” was prescribed. A minimum age of 25 was set for CEng. The requirements for each were academic + experience based. So for example, a typical “Technician”, or “Technical Staff”, or “Technician Engineer’s” Apprenticeship would be 4 years from age 16 with ONC & HNC qualifications studied part time. A Chartered Engineer would start at 18 complete a three year degree and then undergo Graduate Training by an employer. In practice professional bodies sought something beyond this minimum. The IEE (now IET) for example had a schedule of major employer’s job grades that could be considered to illustrate “superior (or senior) responsibility” for CEng.

For a large part of my career, holding IEng seemed to me to offer something positive, although within a few years of gaining it, what by then had become a second strand of my career presented me with the opportunity to migrate into a management role. This involved ongoing responsibilities for “engineers” but not “engineering”. When 20 years later I moved into the PEI world, I became very involved in the issue of what differentiates the IEng & CEng categories, which is the second part of your question.

I agree with your observation that it is “unclear” and if you dig even more into “academic requirements” then it doesn’t become any clearer, although superficially this seems to simplify the issue. To distil “engineering” which is hugely varied into three distinct generic categories is impossible. UK-SPEC is a good try and some people even think it is wonderful. Just like some people believe that academic attainment as described by The International Engineering Alliance (aka Washington Accord) is the best measure of an Engineer’s capability.

Obviously bureaucrats need categories to classify things for various reasons, but any serious analysis of engineering and technology practitioners comes up with one or more continuums, illustrating a statistical distribution (a bell curve) with correlations. So in our context simply put, the categories overlap. For example, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers produced this continuum based on graduates of “Technology” (Engineering Applications) Degrees versus “Engineering” (Science) degrees. Shown at the bottom of this page http://www.rit.edu/emcs/admissions/academics/majors/engineering-tech-or-engineering

Our solution to the problem in simplified terms is; we appoint a jury of “peers”, run a court case and come to a verdict. There are rules procedures and interpretation of UK-SPEC as the reference point. When it comes to dividing IEng and CEng, Engineering Council rules require that we have to hold separate “cases” depending on what the “defendant” (member) has been “charged with” (chosen to apply for) and we find them “guilty or not guilty” (registerable or not). Some forms of evidence like accredited qualifications or training programmes have an agreed higher value in the IET process and a virtually guaranteed entitlement in some other institutions.

A Degree Apprenticeship is working as a trainee, with part-time study to gain a degree, typically started at the age 18 and taking four years (although other ages of start and durations exist) when part-time degree typically took five years that would fit. These were a rather marginal “niche” approach, but some changes to Government Policy (2001) enabling Foundation Degrees which could lead seamlessly to a Bachelors offered me (as an employer’s Training Manager) the opportunity with my college and university partners to turn our 4 year HNC/D Apprenticeship into a degree one. The model became more noticed and started to grow amongst other employers and universities, with the government eventually picking it up and turning it into a major public policy initiative from 2015. https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/apprenticeship-standards/

Picking up some from subsequent posts. Many of the issues in the UK lead back to the reduction/loss of employer’s in-house training capability from the late 1980s onwards. Major employer’s Personnel Departments (now HR) often ran technical training facilities and had Engineers and Technicians in their teams. This still happens in the Armed Forces (with some contracting out) and in other industries where highly skilled and specialised people are essential (e.g. major airline pilot cadet schemes). Non-technical HR people rely on messaging from their own engineers, or other sources such as PEIs or universities, who have often given poor “snobbish type" advice, so we have a rather vicious circle pushing CEng as the solution to any need for engineering expertise or as the “only safe choice”.

I haven’t got time to write and you haven’t time to read a long dissertation around this. I certainly agree that if professional registration is being used as part of selection it is pretty fundamental to understand how and why. I have seen many examples of job advertisements and tender invitations asking for CEng when a good IEng might be better optimised. The last time I challenged this with our recruitment advertisers, they saw it as a “chicken and egg” problem, i.e. there were few IEng candidates anyway and most of them were older (both true). One major London based employer has advertised twice recently for an IEng, so that is a positive development, but they may not find what they want and as I argue in another thread, I think that we can find a better way forward in future.
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0 Roy Bowdler over 6 years ago

Hi Lee, I have only just found time to answer your earlier questions from a few posts ago.   what the average age of someone obtaining IEng was… the lack of clarity as to what exactly difference was… What is an "apprentice degree".

The most important thing is to focus on what works best for your career!

In 2017 the average age of a new registrant for both IEng & CEng categories was 37. The average age of an existing registrant is around 55. 2.3% of registrants are under 30, 8.7% under 35 and 17% under 40. For context 26% of registrants are aged over 65.

I gained IEng at the age of 27, although at that time a “minimum age of 23” was prescribed. A minimum age of 25 was set for CEng. The requirements for each were academic + experience based. So for example, a typical “Technician”, or “Technical Staff”, or “Technician Engineer’s” Apprenticeship would be 4 years from age 16 with ONC & HNC qualifications studied part time. A Chartered Engineer would start at 18 complete a three year degree and then undergo Graduate Training by an employer. In practice professional bodies sought something beyond this minimum. The IEE (now IET) for example had a schedule of major employer’s job grades that could be considered to illustrate “superior (or senior) responsibility” for CEng.

For a large part of my career, holding IEng seemed to me to offer something positive, although within a few years of gaining it, what by then had become a second strand of my career presented me with the opportunity to migrate into a management role. This involved ongoing responsibilities for “engineers” but not “engineering”. When 20 years later I moved into the PEI world, I became very involved in the issue of what differentiates the IEng & CEng categories, which is the second part of your question.

I agree with your observation that it is “unclear” and if you dig even more into “academic requirements” then it doesn’t become any clearer, although superficially this seems to simplify the issue. To distil “engineering” which is hugely varied into three distinct generic categories is impossible. UK-SPEC is a good try and some people even think it is wonderful. Just like some people believe that academic attainment as described by The International Engineering Alliance (aka Washington Accord) is the best measure of an Engineer’s capability.

Obviously bureaucrats need categories to classify things for various reasons, but any serious analysis of engineering and technology practitioners comes up with one or more continuums, illustrating a statistical distribution (a bell curve) with correlations. So in our context simply put, the categories overlap. For example, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers produced this continuum based on graduates of “Technology” (Engineering Applications) Degrees versus “Engineering” (Science) degrees. Shown at the bottom of this page http://www.rit.edu/emcs/admissions/academics/majors/engineering-tech-or-engineering

Our solution to the problem in simplified terms is; we appoint a jury of “peers”, run a court case and come to a verdict. There are rules procedures and interpretation of UK-SPEC as the reference point. When it comes to dividing IEng and CEng, Engineering Council rules require that we have to hold separate “cases” depending on what the “defendant” (member) has been “charged with” (chosen to apply for) and we find them “guilty or not guilty” (registerable or not). Some forms of evidence like accredited qualifications or training programmes have an agreed higher value in the IET process and a virtually guaranteed entitlement in some other institutions.

A Degree Apprenticeship is working as a trainee, with part-time study to gain a degree, typically started at the age 18 and taking four years (although other ages of start and durations exist) when part-time degree typically took five years that would fit. These were a rather marginal “niche” approach, but some changes to Government Policy (2001) enabling Foundation Degrees which could lead seamlessly to a Bachelors offered me (as an employer’s Training Manager) the opportunity with my college and university partners to turn our 4 year HNC/D Apprenticeship into a degree one. The model became more noticed and started to grow amongst other employers and universities, with the government eventually picking it up and turning it into a major public policy initiative from 2015. https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/apprenticeship-standards/

Picking up some from subsequent posts. Many of the issues in the UK lead back to the reduction/loss of employer’s in-house training capability from the late 1980s onwards. Major employer’s Personnel Departments (now HR) often ran technical training facilities and had Engineers and Technicians in their teams. This still happens in the Armed Forces (with some contracting out) and in other industries where highly skilled and specialised people are essential (e.g. major airline pilot cadet schemes). Non-technical HR people rely on messaging from their own engineers, or other sources such as PEIs or universities, who have often given poor “snobbish type" advice, so we have a rather vicious circle pushing CEng as the solution to any need for engineering expertise or as the “only safe choice”.

I haven’t got time to write and you haven’t time to read a long dissertation around this. I certainly agree that if professional registration is being used as part of selection it is pretty fundamental to understand how and why. I have seen many examples of job advertisements and tender invitations asking for CEng when a good IEng might be better optimised. The last time I challenged this with our recruitment advertisers, they saw it as a “chicken and egg” problem, i.e. there were few IEng candidates anyway and most of them were older (both true). One major London based employer has advertised twice recently for an IEng, so that is a positive development, but they may not find what they want and as I argue in another thread, I think that we can find a better way forward in future.
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Professionally registered engineers report higher earnings

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