Get expert help to promote profession

For example, I recall the rather regrettable “building services engineering” stand in the Science Museum some years ago, complete with a very antiquated (even for that time) PC on show and the strangest “music” ever heard to accompany an engineering promotion. It certainly takes my vote as the most tawdry and obfuscated representation of any career that I have ever encountered.

In my experience, engineers often tend to take upon themselves the task of marketing and it is normally a disaster. We should be engaging the most creative brains in that business to promote our industry effectively rather than attempting to do it ourselves. It is no failure to recognise that we need the help of others better qualified to do something.

Of course, we have historically suffered the problem of being associated with engineering that shouldn’t be noticed if it is working properly, and this may account for some confusion on the part of the general public. On one occasion, having been asked my job – replying in such a way as to provide some idea of what I do – I said that among other things I design air-conditioning systems, I was met with a vague look of surprise and the retort “don’t you just switch it on?”

But since awareness of the impact of buildings on the environment has grown we are reinventing ourselves and coming out of the shadows. No longer cursed to work on new buildings that have already been designed before they reach us, we find ourselves at the table discussing matters such as sustainability aspects of masterplanning well in advance of built form being laid down. This is a fairly recent but very welcome development since we have much to offer at the inception end of projects, and doing so only adds value to our professional service. But aside from the domestic problem of whether CIBSE’s title should recognise such developments by implementing a change of name, I believe that there is a broader picture to consider.

It is a remarkable fact of life in the UK that, despite having 10 years of academic study, 25 years of experience and various certificates advising everyone that I am “chartered”, my description as an “engineer” is shared by a variety of others, many of whom have done no more than paint the word on their van.

The failure to protect this very misused word is partly responsible for the confusion that exists in the public mind about precisely what we do for a living and how it differs from installing domestic plumbing. It would help matters greatly if professional engineers were differentiated in this way from technicians and the term “engineer” were to be protected at law in a similar way to the terms doctor and lawyer. Such is the case in other parts of the world where engineers enjoy higher public status, such as France and Germany, where it leads to schoolchildren identifying it as a profession of value and something truly to aspire to.

Alongside other UK professional engineering institutions, we should be lobbying hard to ensure our government understands this issue and does something about it.

Until the idea of being an engineer is something revered in this country by those considering it as a future career, we are tinkering at the margins by worrying about whether we should have the word sustainability somewhere in our title.

Keith Calder, London