Expert Water Engineering Practitioner: Terminology

Qualified, competent, responsible, authorized and terms derived from them have a number of

potential meanings, some of which are important from a regulatory point of view. Some of

these interact with another contested term, reasonable.

Competence is defined as ‘the ability to achieve desired results by the application of knowledge and skill’

in BS EN ISO 9000 Quality management systems Fundamentals and vocabulary. However, a

competent authority is a body responsible for some legal duty, often safety related, and a

competent person is one trained in identifying hazards, and authorized to promptly eliminate them.

In the EU, a qualified person (QP) is responsible for ensuring the safety of medicines. The QP

will have attained specified academic and professional qualifications, together with several years’

experience working in pharmaceutical manufacturing. (Note that someone equivalent to a QP

may be known as a responsible person (RP) or authorized person (AP) in other jurisdictions).

These role descriptions share common features with formal definitions of ‘qualified’ in other

contexts, requiring a combination of academic and practical training which, arguably, should

add up to competence. However, competence and qualification are not necessarily the same.

OSHA, for example, defines a qualified person as one who, “by possession of a recognized degree, certificate, or professional standing, or who by extensive knowledge, training and experience, has successfully demonstrated his ability to solve or resolve problems relating to the subject matter, the work, or the project.”

OSHA defines competence, on the other hand, as the ability to spot hazards and correct them.

Qualified workers might have more technical expertise than ‘competent’ ones, but they would not

necessarily have expertise in hazard recognition or correction. As well as ‘competent’ and ‘qualified’,

OSHA also define ‘authorized’ or ‘certified’ as different terms with corresponding personal statuses.

Meanwhile, the NPFA defines a qualified person as “one who has demonstrated skills and knowledge

related to the construction and operation of electrical equipment and installations, and has

received safety training to identify and avoid the hazards involved.” NFPA 70E requires that only a

qualified person perform work on or near exposed and energized electrical conductors or circuit

parts, and in the UK, the NEC definition is virtually identical.

So, risk management is a key skill which appears in all definitions except for the EU one, perhaps

surprisingly given its context. Is it right that a person responsible for releasing pharmaceuticals

on the market is probably not an engineer, and may not have the formal training required to

understand the production process?

More broadly, who is a qualified person in engineering? Is an engineer not automatically a qualified

person? Do we require licensing, academic qualification, practical experience, and professional

training validated by examinations to be ‘qualified’, or is a relevant degree sufficient?

Should a qualified engineer not be able to spot hazards and correct them? 

What is an engineer? In many countries the linguistic equivalent of engineer is a protected

term, but in the UK this issue frequently arises within engineering institutions, in academia, and

even in legal disputes.

Within UK engineering institutions, the debate largely centers around reserving the title ‘engineer’

for a Chartered Engineer, and this is the sense in which I use the term: i.e. a professional engineer,

with a UK-accredited degree in engineering, at least four years of experience working as an

engineer in the design or technical supervision of full scale-engineering projects, and the letters

CEng after their name (a designation which is not quite the same as PE in the USA).

However, anyone can call themselves an engineer in the UK, so the term is frequently used to

describe car mechanics, domestic appliance repairers, satellite tv dish installers, etc. Thus, in the UK

at present, a Chartered Fellow of a UK engineering institution, recognised as “an engineering professional

of distinction”, and possibly also as a professional engineer in Europe by FEANI (which

covers jurisdictions where the term engineer is protected), has the same professional title as someone

with no relevant qualifications or experience or, as a colleague quipped, an ungeneer.

What about the people who have degrees in engineering but never go on to practice as engineers,

(i.e. designing or providing technical supervision of full scale-engineering projects)? Are

they engineers? Rather like graduates of medical or law degrees, a UK degree in engineering

meets “the academic requirement for the formation of a chartered engineer” but that does not

mean that an engineering degree graduate is an engineer; rather the graduate is ready to be

made into an engineer by other engineers. The institutions consider that the minimum period

required to gain an adequate level of understanding of professional practice is four years.

Around the world, the definition of engineer can vary, but a consensus professional hierarchy

might look something like this:

Engineer: CEng (UK) / PE / EUR ING: Accredited Master’s degree (governed by the

Washington Accord) and minimum 4 years of specified professional experience

Engineering Technologist: IEng: Apprenticeship/Bachelor’s degree (governed by the

Sydney Accord) plus specified experience

Engineering Technician: EngTech: Apprenticeship / Bachelor’s degree/diploma (governed

by the Dublin Accord) plus specified experience

Everyone else is an enjuneer!

What about the people who teach and research in university engineering departments? They

are members of a different profession, that of academia, though there certainly exists a school

of thought that engineering academics can consider themselves engineers. However, academic

titles do not map onto the professional hierarchy above. A professor of engineering may well be

an enjuneer from a Professional Engineer’s point of view!

enjuneer (jocular) aka inguhneer, ungeneer. A non-engineer

As the old engineer joke goes: "“Last yeer I kudn’t spel ungeneer. Now I are won”