Help inform our next campaign

Making engineering interesting!

We need to stand back from the idea the Chartered Status and a4 year M.Eng degree are the way ahead - this must put a lot of younger people off engineering as a career.

There are all of the intermediate levels EngTech / I.Eng and the fact you can be successful with out being registered in many companies IF you have the right training.

Hopefully sometime in future - the benefits of professional registration will become apparent

It always seem that the way to be an engineer is office based / design etc. it needs to be shown that engineering is a very broad area with many branches - schools need support to show ALL the variations and hopefully spark the interest at a very young age.

Also there is a need to look at how apprenticeships are built and delivered (Personally I had a 5 year apprenticeship with British Steel - luckily completed in just over 4 years due to rule changes + 3 year full time HND fast tracked into 2 very heavy years because of my apprenticeship)

We covered the range of areas - Labs, design, R&D, workshops, plants and shutdowns - which allowed us to make informed choices of areas of personal interest when making our career choice.

Women in electronics. I retired a couple of years ago, after working as an Electronic Engineer for over 40 years. On my university course (Electrical and Electronic Engineering) there were about 50 undergraduates and all of them were male. At my retirement, I handed over my role, managing a worldwide team of application engineers for a software company, to a woman. Including her, in a team of around 15 engineers, there were two women. That's progress, but very slow. Engineering can also be “people work”. The application engineering work was just as much about written and spoken communication as it was about engineering. Female engineers, who I managed, found sometimes that customers believed they were talking to an administrator rather than an engineer. However, once those customers found they were receiving solutions to their problems, then such prejudice evaporated. Is such work overlooked by the IET? The IET seems to me to focus on the design and build aspects of engineering. Many engineers are involved directly in that. However, the complexity of modern systems means that most are developed and maintained by large teams, with many different roles in the team. Roles that involve daily face to face communication with customers are seen as rather trivial, whereas, in reality, they require both deep engineering and excellent communication skills. It's similar to the difference between a GP and a surgeon. When young people think of a doctor, many will think of a GP. When they think of an engineer, they may think of a technician (who is less qualified)  or an engineer who works alone in a lab. There are opportunities in technology for professionally qualified people with “a good bedside manner”.

My bigger concern is, and has always been, the huge percentage of the engineering profession who do not consider the IET, or any other PEI, worth joining - there are far more engineers in the UK outside the PEIs than inside them. That suggests to me that we may well have a diversity issue ourselves, that it is possible that people who join PEIs (and remain in them) are the type of people who join PEIs, not necessarily representative of the engineering profession

i shall try and avoid trading on any of the UXBs left by previous posters.  

I am not an IET member, but I am a practicing consultant engineer, in a field for which on paper I am not very well qualified, but I am doing very well.

But rather than ask ‘why do I not join the IET ?’  perhaps try not to assume it is automatically a good thing, and we all should. 

Rather, let's ask critically what I would get from joining. 

For me it would offer a periodically drain on the bank balance, a restaurant in London I would never visit, and a set of publications I would not have time to read. It would not offer security of employment or higher wages (it is not a union) it would not offer a better career path - I am already at max capacity. Nor would it offer prestige - if the IET made statements the way the BMA does, it might be an organisation more widely heard of. 

So, I stay outside, and I suspect others make a similar calculation.

Mike.

(for the wonderers. I am male and white, state school educated, non-practicing C of E,  and a bit grumpy at times.. I think that none of that is relevant.)

This just popped up in another conversation this morning, and I thought it was so good and relevant I felt I had to add it in before this thread tails off:

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:

We need diverse representation not only so every kid can see themselves as the hero of the story, but so that every kid can understand that other kinds of kid are also the heroes of the story.

….we should probably publish diversity reports of our elected Fellowship, Trustee board, Council etc too 

Just a thought on this, I have long thought there is (or at least may be) a diversity issue on the BoT and Council, and various committees, just not one that's usually considered: for a full time employed engineer it is VERY difficult to be part of these, just from the time commitment. It is noticeable how many of those in these positions are the self employed, retired, academics or in other positions where it is easier to make the time. Of course it's not the rule, there are many exceptions, but for those exceptions it can be (as I know from friends who have done it) very difficult.

So looking at how Council roles in particular can be made more accessible to, and hence representative of, engineers in engineering roles (who, male or female, could well have family and other commitments as well) could be very valuable. I do acknowledge that this is really difficult!

And kudos to those who do push their managers and give up other commitments so that they can do it.

Thanks,

Andy

Gideon: 
 

Does IET have figures for the proportions of these various groups & categories under discussion?

I mean, a) in the population, b) practicing at specific level, c) and with membership of IET?

I recall seeing some (not all!) of this data when looking at the IET's EDI strategy a few months ago. I agree it would be very interesting to see for the sake of transparency, and identifying where we need to do better as an organisation!

I wonder what the differences would look like when stratifying by things like membership type, professional registration level, activeness in terms of volunteering and local networks, etc. If for example we end up recruiting a diverse bunch of engineers to the membership but they're not being equipped with the skills/opportunities to reach professional registration, that in itself could be an issue worth investigating.

Edit: in fact, at risk of ruffling a few feathers - in the interests of transparency and holding ourselves to account, we should probably publish diversity reports of our elected Fellowship, Trustee board, Council etc too ? (unless we're doing this already, which would be great!)

Does IET have figures for the proportions of these various groups & categories under discussion?

I mean, a) in the population, b) practicing at specific level, c) and with membership of IET?

I'm asking UK based, and most posters seem to be assuming such, but as the IET is (pretends to be) international, the scope of the OP isn't clear.

Similarly, this forum is sort of double-legged, professional level engineers, and electricians - quite different. I don't know if other careers are well represented here? 

Questions, questions… 

I think that discrimination is embedded in western culture. For an example, my mother was born to a member of the British Army in a British Army Hospital. However she was classed as alien and had to keep massive records of why she was British because her father was from Ireland and the hospital was in Malta.

I detest the characterisation of sub-cultures even though we are using metaphors to name them, e.g. White and Black. All people are important. I call myself Northern European when I have to.

And then we use terms like Man to mean something? Well as a man I detest sport, avoiding playing it as a child and rarely watching it since - only really the Tour de France. Also school did an excellent job of turning me off poetry and I don't like songs either.

SMW: 
It is the fact that the most under privileged group in society today is the white male.

Except for, maybe, asylum seekers, those 500+ subpostmasters unsafely convicted of fraud in the PO Horizon affair, paraplegic and quadriplegic people trying to navigate public transport in cities, epileptics and those with other physical constraints trying to hold down a job in conditions not designed for their needs, and so on. Really, the list is quite long.

If we do have to go into BLM matters, and I think we do, a quote from the government may be apt

there were 6 stop and searches for every 1,000 White people, compared with 54 for every 1,000 Black people

from

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-justice-and-the-law/policing/stop-and-search/latest

The government uses 18 ethnic categories, and there is a bar chart on rates of stop and search. The rate for blacks is nine times that for whites. Whatever the reasons for that, it does mean that the experience of black people with police in cities is rather different from that of whites. This is underscored by the experience of the astonishingly talented George the Poet, a Cambridge literature graduate and award-winning podcaster who turned down an MBE in 2019, who has said quite clearly that the experience of being who he is did/does not mesh with the prevailing cultural mores:

 “That top-down approach to education, the idea that smart, cultured, well-off people are going to share with you how to be like them, does not work. I can say that because that was almost imposed upon me, and I struggled with it for a long time.

“It did not make as much sense as sticking with what I started with. I was in a school that was very different from the environment I grew up in and the messaging I received was that the way guys like me talked, and what we valued, was just not going to cut it.

He is to give the Longford Lecture on prison reform tonight. Maybe we could ask him how many of his childhood buddies are Chartered Engineers; why, and why not? No matter what your views on privilege, the answer might well be very informative.

Hi everyone. Thank you again for your continued contribution. Can I please remind everyone to be civil, polite, and above all respectful of other opinions, even when they differ from one's own. The whole point of this post is to gather as many differing opinions as possible as ALL matter to us. Thank you and please keep sharing your experiences and ideas!