An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

140A CHRONICLE OF THE ENGINEERING COUNCILvery concerned about the difficulty they had in finding suitable material for theirprogrammes. They were more than eager to accept our offer to be a broker with engineeringcompanies. So without further ado, we approached numbers of our Industry Affiliates andoffered them TV coverage for their products. At chief executive level, this was invariablygreeted with enormous enthusiasm and fervent promises of early contacts with lots of highgradematerial. I have to say, however, that in not one case did a company actually provideanything for us to offer to any TV programme. Eventually we had to taper off our contactswith the producers because of the embarrassment of being unable to deliver.“The response to the “unification” exercise from Registrants (I believe to be a much-resentedterm) was mixed. Many approved but others were Institution haters and felt that we had beenfatally compromised by the concessions made to the Institutions. In response we revampedour Newsletter, and produced a new journal called Engineering First which I am sure was amajor improvement in our effort to keep Registrants in the picture and seek their views.“An important way in which we sought information from Registrants was the two-yearly, buteventually annual, salary survey. This proved that Registered Engineers were, on average,well paid and on a par with their other professional colleagues. It was excellent propaganda inthe cause of persuading young people that engineering was a worthwhile profession. Somemajor Institutions, however, objected to the message on the grounds that it was an insult totheir lower-paid members.“Importantly, however, research into young people’s attitudes carried out by the Engineeringand Marine Training Authority showed that parents had a significantly stronger effect onopinions than teachers. It was, therefore, important to reach out to parents and that, in effect,meant the general public.”On this last point Senator Sir Michael Lickiss agrees:“I believe the EngC had a unifying effect for the benefit of the engineering profession, but itdid not manage to rid parents and the general public of an image of the “oily rag”. I know ittried, but the country became desperately short of a whole range of engineers and I suspectthat most parents, too, did not encourage their children because of this unfortunate image.”Mike Heath continues:“My strategy was the use of mass media advertising, using TV in particular. We were in thebusiness of changing public attitudes; a massive task but not impossible as could be seenfrom the Government campaigns in favour of seat belts and against drinking and driving. Weestimated that sums of around £3m per year would be needed so clearly the EngineeringCouncil could not go it alone. Approaches to the major Institutions (the only ones withanything like the resources to make a difference) proved negative. Their view was generallythat the proper use of their resources was in servicing their members, not in reaching out tothe public. We argued that such a campaign would be entirely in the interests of theirmembers but it cut little ice.“We, therefore, went elsewhere and found ready partners in the EEF and EMTA. Weemployed a major advertising and marketing agency (J Walter Thompson) and set about atwo-stage campaign. Stage 1 would have been to approach potential sponsors from amongengineering companies, showing them potential campaign material, convincing them that it© Engineering Council UK 2004