eric,

"One thing that I think IEAust could do to promote engineering is to do profiles of high powered engineers or people in high powered positions that have engineering training. That way you could show that engineering trainaing is good for a variety of positions not just nuts and bolts engineering."

Has anybody heard of a bloke called Andy Thomas?
He’s a Mechanical Engineer probably the most famous from Australia.
Maybe the goverment could use him as a role model for kids in school.

With an engineering education you can pretty much go into any technical job. The opportunities are huge. I disagree with some of the comments made in here that engineering is a low paid job. It has one of the highest starting salaries for a university graduate with mining engineering grads starting on salaries as high as 70k.

It is common practice now in the US for engineers to do a business qualification such as an MBA or some other business degree. It is not uncommon for people with these qualifications to receive 6 figure salaries. Yes there are poorly paid engineers working for local governments but there are people in all professions who are poorly paid.

I don't think that there is a shortage of examples of engineers demonstrating their organisational skills outside of purely technical aspects.
Just for starters I might mention the engineer who was one of the three commissioners for the 1976/77 Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry (and probably asked the most relevant and probing questions of those providing evidence; and who, later, was the first head of the Great Barrier Marine Park Authority). Another, a mining engineer, was head of personnel for Comalco for some years. Engineers' training and organisational skills are relevant well beyond the borders of engineering projects.
I think it is unfortuate that Federal Governments of all recent persuasions have devolved responsibilities so much to the private sector that no longer is there a reservoir of much depth containing engineering skills within Government ranks.
That impacts on the independence and impartiality of advice available to governments. It also impacts on the professional body, deprived of government sector numbers, and now largely viewing the health of the profession more from an entrepreunarial standpoint. One where a dearth of projects is of more consequence than the social ecological health of a society caught up in a whirlwind of "development".

As an engineer for 15 odd years. One thing I have noticed is that friends who started as a graduate engineer quite a few now have gone into diverse roles outside engineering. Into merchant banking, Risk in Insurnace companies, management leaders of other industry - textile/clothing. What IEAust should sell is the fact that engineers can move into these or staying in the diversity of engineering itself. I have never heard of a person with a commerce/business background becoming an engineer but not uncommon for an engineer to move into commerce/business.

The set of skills for engineers is unique and allows this career change.

Frankly for the money IEAust gets it should do more.

AS an Aus-born engineer who 20 years ago EASILY earned the marks for entry into medicine, and now working in the automation/controls industry, let me say one thing... engineering is TOO intellectually and otherwise difficult for most people in it... meaning that even the smarter ones have to waste their careers arguing and fixing the mistakes and cowering to the bigwigs...

Savior68....come and work with me :)

are u up to speed on the self starting of encoderless brushless dc motors ? That is the next project. Will be using a DSP with existing code, just needs to be fine tuned for an application.

I don't quite see your point in relation to the topic though, and if your as smart as your post suggests, (I don't doubt it) I'm surprised you did not give a more analytical perspective on the future prospects of Aussie engineers in the light of outsourcing etc...

I would appreciate your own insights on this.

Anedotal memory. In my former life of employment by others, a 3rd yr Elec Eng student on work experience was mean't to charge up a large clamp mount capacitor for a test, he almost connected the voltage to the 'clamp tabs' rather than the +/- on the top. I think he left engineering after that.

Isn't it odd that the gate keepers of our currency make huge profits and produce nothing of practical use.Insurance companies create the need for their existence through our legal system.

Most people don't study the sciences because of the poor pay.Our brightest minds crave to become litigation lawyers.I find this some what perverted.

If we are training our brightest to take more from our economy in non productive enterprises we have to expect to be left behind in technological and scientific innovation.