An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

1988-1990: THE BARLOW YEARS 77Affiliates. The EngC Chairman confirmed these in a follow-up letter, encouraging eachAffiliate to participate.By the end of 1989, 277 Industry Affiliates [an increase of 67 mostly small and medium sizedcompanies over the 1988 figure] had been recruited following a joint approach to tradeassociation members. BEAMA [already mentioned], the Electronic Engineering Association,the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors and the Association of Consulting Engineersin particular, had been contacted.The sixth Annual Industry Forum was held in November 1990, attended by over 100 seniorrepresentatives from the EngC Industry Affiliates. The main items discussed were theproposed national system for CPD and the formation of an Engineering Occupations’Standards’ Group (EOSG) – see below. In the same month a ‘Working Together (Industry-Education Initiative)’ was published, supporting the campaign begun early in 1990. By theend of 1990 there were 247 Industry Affiliates – a reduction of 30 companies compared withthe 1989 numbers, brought about mainly by company mergers and the economic climate.Other Industrial ActivitiesA network of Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) was set up by Government in 1989 toenable local companies to help create relevant local skills bases. Because CEng, IEng andEngTech qualifications were competence based, the EngC’s framework was most attractiveto the TECs; it provided a measure of existing skills within a company, a means to identifyand quantify any additional skills needed, and a yardstick against which new courses could bemeasured. The EngC, however, needed to explain how industry could benefit by the use ofEngC titles. Sir William Barlow wrote to the emerging TECs explaining the EngC’s positionin setting and maintaining standards of training for engineers and technicians and offeredsupport to meet the TECs’ objectives.The plan for the Engineering Occupations’ Standards’ Group (EOSG), discussed at the 1990Industry Affiliates’ Conference, was for a national coordination of standards across allengineering disciplines to secure a uniformity of approach and use of nomenclature. It waslater realised that this would also be of benefit in allocating engineers consistently toparticular sections of the EngC Register. In the event the EngC and the EmploymentDepartment, both seeking to avoid the emergence of diverse standards, aided the setting up ofthe EOSG. However, it was a complicated scenario as most of the former statutory IndustryTraining Organisations, such as the Engineering Industry Training Board (EITB), had beendisbanded by Government legislation. [Although the Engineering Training Authority - ETA -later emerged from the ashes of the old EITB.] The coordination task was, therefore,enormous as some 70 bodies associated with engineering were involved. The GovernmentWhite Paper ‘Employment for the 1990s’ had, nevertheless, encouraged the EngC to take aninterest in competence-based performance standards and the EOSG offered a suitableopportunity for progress. The Construction Industry Standing Conference was used as amodel to form similar broad groups across engineering.Interfacing with the PublicThe Public Affairs staff, led by Ron Kirby in publicising the EngC’s aims and objectivesduring 1989, briefed Members of Parliament regularly, and achieved a 19% increase inreferences to the EngC in the national media and a 57% increase in provincial press coverage.© Engineering Council UK 2004