Alan Turing or Nikola Tesla

Alex Barrett:
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The registration  review requires the candidate to make a sales pitch highlighting their own talents, and back that up with a live presentation and discussion with a panel of assessors.
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I feel the process favours those gifted in marketing and social skills.

 

As a corollary to this, I've a colleague who is a world class consultant in his field, with a track record in business, who in my mind is a natural Fellow. I know he would appreciate Fellowship, but is not the sort to push himself forward for recognition. I accept that an engineer needs to have relatively good communication skills, and some measure of commercial drive, but I do feel that our system favours the careerist over the talented engineer. Looking at some Fellows I associate with does nothing to dispel this impression. Neither does most of the literature coming out of the IET.

I'd actually suggest that the real world of engineering (i.e. outside the PEIs 😊 ) is no worse than any other profession in this regard, and possibly slightly better than some. It does very much depend on the role, consultancy (which I now work in) I would say has more "pushy" types in it than, say development and manufacturing engineering where I came from. The music industry which I used to work in I'd suggest is far more ego driven than the rail industry I now work in. But again this is true across all professions. 

We should be very careful about gender stereotyping here: anyone who has involvement with (for example) the marketing profession will know that women can be just as aggressive as men in the workplace!

But yes I'd totally agree about the confidence thing (again which applies across all professions), and this is something we can address as a profession if we decide to do it. Personally I think my bugbear of the appalling lack of training and development given to engineering managers and team leaders is a big issue here.

Oh, the Fellowship thing...I think the IET is very clear that it wants to see business leaders as Fellows (quite reasonably), and the process is pretty straightforward for that. Where the process is confusing is for recognising those who have a long respected technical career, it does (from the way it's presented) appear to need a recent "big event" to hang the application on.

The big issue I noticed is that there is more support for potential applicants than there appears to be. This is really important, given that I think fair to say that most potential applicants aren't going to apply unless they are pretty sure they are going to get it - the sort of person who is eligible has plenty of other things to occupy them! I have found that the IET could be much clearer that Fellowship Advisers are there and available to support "over a coffee" chats before pen is put to paper, which would be a huge help to the type of person I think you're describing. I'm as passionate about putting potential Fellows in touch with advisers as I am about putting potential registrants in touch with PRAs. In practice this is what I find the most successful at getting the less confident - but highly able - over the hurdle.

Getting my CMgr was interesting...I had a phone call with a CMI adviser who talked through my recent career (against specific criteria), and they then basically put together my application. (The CMI then interviews supporters over the phone to check this.) They recognise that people at that sort of senior level have other things to think about. If Fellowship had a route that worked like that I'd bet there'd be far more applicants - and excellent ones at that.

In summary: I'd like to see far more Fellows appearing who are doing such interesting things that they haven't really got the time or energy to expend on persuading the IET to accept them as Fellows!

Incidentally, when I do run across potential fellows I always encourage them to apply asap - because the process is based on recent activities / achievements it's worth getting the application in as soon as they have something nice and clear to show in the past five years.

(P.S. I am not, of course, a Fellow. I have never actually applied. But I've got very near applying several times now so I'm getting to know the start of the process quite well!)

Cheers,

Andy

In my experience, PRA's are in short supply in our region, I was looking to the opposite end of East Anglia and beyond when I went through this process. Young RAF engineers at Marham voiced the same issue.

I agree entirely with your observations re. the Fellowship process. My candidate has in the past been the founding technical director of a tech business, but is now operating in semi-retirement as a solo consultant, albeit to global authorities such as CERN. He has observed that all the Fellows he knew have passed on, so as you say, some proactive outreach from the IET Fellowship team could be helpful. I have LN committee colleagues who are Fellowship assessors so I might voice this suggestion there, although in my experience the IET is not driven or moved by suggestions from the engine room.

Andy Millar:
We should be very careful about gender stereotyping here: anyone who has involvement with (for example) the marketing profession will know that women can be just as aggressive as men in the workplace!

Sorry, of course you're right, I'd agree that's the perception at that age - and actually probably for many working engineers too. I'd say it's a mistaken one, the grass isn't actually greener in other professions, but we have an uphill struggle to change that!

Alex Barrett:
In my experience, PRA's are in short supply in our region, I was looking to the opposite end of East Anglia and beyond when I went through this process. Young RAF engineers at Marham voiced the same issue.