STAR LETTER: playing the lottery

Until recently, I was employed as a membership consultant by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. The purpose of my job was to assess and moderate the recommendations made by the professional interview panels to the membership committee. During my five years in this position, I observed that about 1 in 10 applications for corporate membership came from engineers employed in the building services sector.

Naturally, we were keen to know why these candidates had chosen the Institution of Mechanical Engineers for their first application for chartered engineer status, rather than CIBSE. The frequent reply was that the CIBSE membership process was seen as a lottery and that the mechanical institution offered a more predictable outcome to justify the time and effort expended in making a membership application. In other words, the mechanical institution’s route was felt to be a hedge against the kind of miscarriages in membership election decisions that Ron Oughton is concerned about.

Of course, I am sure that things have come a long way since the days when a CIBSE president privately described his membership committee as a “Jurassic Park of retirees and failed academics”. But the evidence is that there is a sizable gap remaining between CIBSE’s “we have got it right” self-assessment and the way in which the CIBSE product is seen in the market. Clearly, some vital work still needs to be done to ensure the “more rational assessment” that Ron Oughton is seeking.

Ian Brown, former deputy secretary, CIBSE