Sainsbury Management Fellowship (SMF) has called for a ban on hard hats and clichéd images from advertising and promotion to improve the image of engineers and attract job applicants.
The humble hard-hat got an emphatic thumbs-down from over 200 respondents to our poll on this subject. Almost 64 per cent of respondents agreed with the Sainsbury Management Fellowship that portrayal of engineers wearing personal protective equipment is inaccurate and feeds into inaccurate and outdated stereotyping of the profession. The next largest group, 18 per cent, thought that consumers were savvy enough to see through the visual stereotyping used by the media. A little over 12 per cent of respondents defended the hard-hat, saying that it was integral to many engineering tasks and that potential engineers would have to get used to wearing them. A small proportion, 5 per cent, thought that integration of Google Glass into hard-hats might make them a more attractive proposition.
What’s your take on this issue? Do the clothes make the engineer, or should the profession be portrayed with more variety? Let us know below.
This is a difficult one. How do you portrait an engineer accurately? Taking a picture of engineers sitting in front of their screens in a big office could easily be confused with a call centre.
I am not alone in thinking (many of my colleagues agree) that the hard hat image is not the issue at all. The issue is that the media is hardly if ever reporting about engineering and what engineers do. In the absence of this, hard hats get my approval every time.
What is the alternative to hard hats? People love stereotyping and this one fits the bill every time.
Before dumbing down hard hats, people have to ask themselves what if anything is ever reported in the media in regards of engineering?
Big projects is the answer.
Hard hats go!
Clothes do not make the engineer! We are fed continual streams of jounalistic hyperbole by jounalists that can talk about engineering, but are also not engineers (in many but not all cases) and editors who choose the pictures.
Not only do the media people like to see men in hard hats looking studiously at large blueprints, but they also seem to like angle grinders creating showers of sparks in the background!!
We are a profession of thinkers, problem solvers and appliers of logic based on careful analysis and understanding.
To the media I can see the photos being created of the slightly greying but good looking early 40’s intelligent guy with a good hair cut and frameless spectacles (holding a slide rule – no maybe that’s a step too far!!)
But as Engineers we aren’t really interested – we have more engaging things to deal with – our jobs and the current project we need to get results on. How to make it better cheaper faster etc.
And ……….we are everywhere and impact on everything.
Long live Engineers – normal people from everyday life with a practical logical view.
I’m proud to be one!
You might just as well show them in oil-stained boiler suits.
That gives the same impression and serves to support and maintain the public belief that any mechanic, fitter, machine operator, fax repairer or pretty well anyone that touches an ‘engineered’ object, is an engineer.
While hard hats may be an on-site requirement in civil and marine engineering situations, they are not synonymous with engineering as a whole.
Engineers should be seen as thinkers, rather than doers. That might enhance their profile.
At my work site, the only time anyone wears a hard hat is when a unit is being lifted by a small crane to shoulder height in order to transport it from a test rig to a trolley and vise versa. I wouldn’t class that bit of skill as Engineering. Normally everyone wears comfortable clothes or suits if dealing with customers. To me, a hard hat signifies a building site and builders.
Maybe this question simply clarifies that the Victorian idea of an ‘Engineer ‘(reflected in the publication’s title, which goes back to that age) is largely outmoded. Emotional as this may understandably be we live in an age when say modern farmers are really ‘Farm managers’, as likely to be working with a spreadsheet as driving around a field.
Similarly ‘Professional ‘ Engineers, at least in all but the smallest of organisations, are as likely to be project managers, supply chain managers, (necessarily) meeting engineers, quality engineers, six-sigma practitioners, systems engineers etc. as they are engineering designers or production engineers (which encompass all the above disciplines).
So whilst engineering still lies at the core of the production of physical artefacts, such as computers, cars, bridges and aircraft, it’s only likely to be the junior engineer (or home hobbyist) who is lucky enough to really have any connection to what we hark back to as ‘Engineering’. So from the outside people who wish to still label themselves ‘Engineers’ need to resign themselves to the fact that they are often playing either the role of a ‘cog in the machine’ mainly in an office without even a drawing board to distinguish themselves OR when more senior they are just as likely to be meeting engineers or managing by dashboard. As has been mentioned I think that it will be big and bold projects which capture the imagination of the public.
Related – many recent TV shows have publicized the ‘Factory’ end of say Rolls Royce or BAe. What I would like to work out is how to make the wonderfully fascinating and truly creative large scale Design End of auto and aero industries into entertaining TV. Any ideas anyone?
And slightly provocatively should the Engineer think of a new title to reflect the modern form of the profession???
Peter I’m sorry but I believe a good engineer should be both a thinker AND doer.
In my early days as an energy consultant, my boss used to tell me not to waste time talking to people wearing hard hats, boiler suits or white coats, as they were least likely to be decision makers!
I know who gave me the most reliable nformation, though.
In connection with this issue I thought I would make you aware of an e-petition which is concerned with elevating the title of ‘Engineer’:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/44889
‘The Engineer’ might have already reported this: if not, perhaps it deserves mention in areas of the magazine other than this comments sub-section.
I wear a suit to my air-conditioned office, and I sit at a computer. Every single palce I have worked has been like this. Even when I need to do a bit of hands on work such as building models or working with manufacturing I will still be wearing a suit. As do all my collegues and friends in the industry. This is a modern day engineer.
I am a Design Engineer- I spend a lot of time at a computer in a shirt and tie, and I’m damned proud on the occasions I get to go out into the real world of Engineering hardware and wear a hard hat.
Proud of them- that’s what we should be !
The result of this survey is the worst, most damning thing I have seen in over thirty years as an Engineer. What it means is that -at least in this survey- a majority of those who call themselves Engineers have lost connection with the actual output of Engineering, which is of course hardware. This has been encouraged by the redefinition of CEng requirements which, for a Mechanical Engineer, now mean that you can be considered a professional Engineeer without having so much as picked up a file. This is why we have CAD operators calling themselves Engineers, producing so -called drawings, who would not in years gone by been considered as Draughtsmen, since they generate merely pretty pictures with no input as to how something will be manufactured.
Perhaps this also has something to say about the UK’s general lack of competitiveness, in that if you do not connect with the hardware, you’re probably just an overhead.
No one who lacks practical craft skills and training should be allowed to call themselves an Engineer, and all the Universities that stopped providing this vital training should have their accreditations revoked.
When I was a kid, I went to the power stations that my father designed and we wore hard hats because of the health and safety regulations. So hard hats make me things of engineers.
I grew up in Canada and think that there is a lot of respect associated with them there. Where as in the UK there isn’t.
Aren’t Sainsburys Management Fellowship the same outfit that a while back insisted engineers should learn their management speak to get on? Anything they have to say does not impress me one little bit!
Let’s not get hung up on what we look like in the media lets get the media to portray engineering as a whole as something really interesting that kids might actually like to do….remember the BBC Schools programmes anyone? Oh, and to end in engineering speak to Sainsbury’s…bollocks!
In thirty years in Engineering, I’ve always received respect in contact with other professions, schools and so on, never mistaken for a coffee machine repairman, and probably fairly paid too. The practical skills I was taught have frequently helped others as well as myself.
Hmm.. am I unique in not experiencing what I regard as thes fantasies, or do I simply not have a massive Teacher-like shoulder chip and an expectation for the rest of the world to grovel at my feet ?