Engineering profession structure

Occasionally, the foundations of engineering structures do not perform as intended. When a foundation failure occurs, it is important to study it carefully to see what has gone wrong. For the profession as a whole, this knowledge is useful to prevent a recurrence. The challenge to the engineering profession is to reduce recurrences of past failure to a minimum. From the point of view of engineering science, a foundation failure is a destructive full-scale experiment up to the ultimate state. As such, useful lessons can be learnt. On the other hand, a failure is also a painful and expensive experience for the parties involved, and for society as a whole. Therefore since the price is already paid after a failure, it is important to learn from the experience (Chan 1996, 2004). 

The engineering profession has a two-tier structure. At the first level, there are the engineering institutions, that is, the ehartered professional bodies, eaeh of whieh covers a single or several closely related engineering diseiplines. Examples are the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the British Computer Society. Each institution has its own rules regarding membership and its own codes of practice and conduct. 

Marxist inspired discussions of the engineering profession in relation to class structure, in parallel to studies of engineering education and skills from a perspective coming from industrial sociology . 

In spite of the ubiquity and technological importance of the vitreous state, the literature of our profession is quite thin on the subject. In part this is because many of the important technical problems that chemical engineers have so successfully solved in the past have been closely related to the petroleum industry and, hence, involve primarily physical and chemical transformations that take place in fluids. Glasses, moreover, being structurally liquid-like but mechanically solid, and having history-dependent properties that nevertheless can persist unchanged over geological times, fall... 

In this chapter, a brief history of the emergence of production and industrial engineering is presented. Significant developments in its evolution, education and course structure, and the profession of production and industrial engineering are highlighted. New technologies and their possible application for improving productivity and quality of product, process, and service are briefly discussed. 

We can look at the Renaissance and the individual works that were created within that time period from a strictly engineering perspective as well. This may give us, as engineers, the insight with which to revitalize the profession in modern times. The dome of St. Peter s cathedral in Vatican City (Figure 2.12) is a good example of the creation of a novel structural system... 

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