Prestige versus Practicality—A Dilemma for the Engineering Profession

British engineers have claimed that their important contributions to economic and social well-being, based on their achievements as practical people, have gone unrecognized or unrewarded. Yet over the past thirty years efforts to boost the social prestige of British engineers appear to have undermined the social arrangements which fostered the strong practical ethos. Increasing reliance on the full-time educational system is tending to raise social prestige through bringing the ‘all graduate profession’ and through trends to recruitment from higher social backgrounds. Yet these trends have been associated with a fall in traditional and recognizable training. This paper examines both the nature of the ‘practical’ tradition and efforts to raise ‘prestige’ and asks whether the engineering profession is caught on the horns of an irresolvable dilemma—to boost either prestige or practicality. The paper concludes that in principle the British pattern of education and training has much to commend it still, with the strong emphasis on training elements in a working environment. But it is argued that its success will depend on engineers and their employers becoming much more active in the field of training.