The importance of certification/registration in expanding engineering career opportunities

Abstract

Medicine, from the point of view of its use of technological innovation, is considered by the author to be the most underdeveloped activity world-wide. Present-day engineering expertise can plan, design and construct a great variety of devices and techniques which increase the effectiveness of medical diagnosis and of treatment, of rehabilitation of the disabled, together with a range of‘spin-offs’-for example assisting in producing improved sports performance.

The difficulties in exploiting to the full the opportunities available to engineers in medicine are much the same as those which inhibit the exploitation of engineering in general to its full potential. These difficulties, according to Professor Kenedi, are not the result of the oft reputed ‘lack of liaison’ between technological education and industry (the latter incidentally being the health service for engineering in medicine) or of the apparent ‘lack of orientation’ of the UK's young people to engineering-these are only symptoms. The malaise is considered to be deeper seated and more subtle: although living in a characteristically multiprofessional world (this is particularly true of the health service) the British still attempt to guide the development of engineering on the bases of inapplicable, restrictive and inhibitive uni-professional concepts and principles.

For example Professor Kenedi suggests that the UK should start to register, statutorily, qualified engineers' pre-experience so as to compile a reliable data-base on which to plan manpower, and engineers should not be ‘chartered’ for life in a particular professional stream just because institutions are uni-professional. Individual career reorientations are now commonplace and an engineer's original ‘chartering’ is frequently inapplicable in later career. In this context, reaccreditation should be employed, firstly to make ‘chartering’ keep pace with career changes, and, secondly, (more importantly) to ensure periodic updating of competence. Industry is now acutely conscious of the increasingly frequent incidence of ‘skill obsolescence’, particularly in the ranks of its highly qualified staff.

In the UK's Engineering Council there is the organization to guide, encourge and, when necessary, push engineering out of its present ineffective morass. To do this with effect the Council will need to adopt a directly active altitude to the introduction of reforms that are so very much needed now.