An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

50A CHRONICLE OF THE ENGINEERING COUNCILat Part 2 level. An Examination Review Working Party was set up by the Board forEngineers’ Registration to reconsider the guidance and rules for candidates and to review thestructure and syllabi of the Examination.Continuing Education and Training‘A Call to Action – Continuing Education and Training for Engineers and Technicians’,prepared by Bernard Dawkins, the EngC’s CET Executive in the Engineering ProfessionDirectorate, was published in June 1986. This well-received report looked at clear linksbetween a company’s performance and its investment in the CET of its employees. TwoAnnexes were also published: an ‘Industrial Consultants’ Survey’ and a ‘Summary ofResponses to the Discussion Document’. The report was followed up in 1987 with a wellattendedconference in Liverpool dealing with Britain’s urgent need to improve the CET forengineers and technicians.The EngC further developed this theme in a consultative document ‘Continuing Educationand Training: A national system for engineering’, calling for Career Action Plans in whichengineers should consider and state their intentions for CET for a year or more ahead. Thisproved extremely popular in early 1988 with requests pouring into the EngC at the rate of 500a week from industrial executives who had read about it in the press. Consequently the EngChad to reprint the discussion document within six weeks of its launch. A working party wasestablished and a Workshop held at the University of York followed by pilot schemes to testthe ideas on a national scale later in 1988, as we shall describe in Chapter 4.The document ‘Management and Business Skills for Engineers: a Statement – ContinuingEducation and Training’ was published in March 1988, contending that engineers couldbecome very successful managers. The statement reviewed the background and suggestedhow individual engineers interested in management and business skills should learn aboutbusiness.Interfacing InternationallyFEANI and European Engineer (EurIng)International agreement on the Eur Ing standard, mentioned in Chapter 2, was reached in1986, with important contributions coming from the British National Committee forInternational Engineering Affairs (BNCIEA), involving a fundamental revision of the FEANIRegister. This now laid down minimum standards for registration and a system formonitoring and up-dating standards. Following an agreement between BNCIEA and FEANIwhich finally gave international recognition to Chartered Engineers (see Chapter 2) the term“European Engineer” and associated designatory letters “Eur Ing” were launched in Paris inOctober 1987 during a ceremony at the Luxembourg Palace. The five chairmen of theExecutive Group Committees of the Board for Engineers’ Registration, and five otherBritons, were among the first 60 professional engineers to be awarded the title EuropeanEngineer.For Technician Engineers a seminar, organised by the EngC and chaired by Sir MontyFinniston, was held in 1987 at the Royal Society of Arts on their role, education and trainingin countries other than Britain, particularly France, West Germany, USA and Japan. Thespeakers were four Churchill Travelling Fellows.© Engineering Council UK 2004