Boundaryless Profession, My Arse! #2

Further to recent discussions, I offer below an excerpt from my dictionary of chemical engineering practice. Hyperlinks have been changed from the original form.

"Are process engineers/engineering and chemical engineers/engineering one and the same? The most common view amongst both practitioners and academics nowadays appears to be that chemical engineering is the name of a degree, process engineer is a job title; and neither is the name of a profession.

If so, then does the profession of ‘Chemical Engineering’ which I joined when I first became a Chartered Engineer no longer exist? Despite many publicly available definitions which accord with my understanding of the term, the people who practice chemical engineering no longer have an unambiguous name.

In the 1990s, becoming a Chartered Chemical Engineer required (amongst other things), a degree in chemical engineering plus an absolute minimum of four years’ experience designing or supporting the operation of full-scale process plants, applying the principles of process safety in practice. These are no longer the tests to become a Chartered Chemical Engineer, therefore the title no longer carries the same meaning as it did.

More generally, the term chemical engineer has changed its meaning during the time I have practised my now-nameless profession of designing and supporting the operation of process plants. It has not been replaced by the term process engineer: many ‘process engineers’ have no degree in any kind of engineering, nor any training or experience in applying the principles of process safety. Some of them do not even work with chemical/process plants.

The changes in the meaning of the title have allowed academics and others without practical experience or engineering degrees to call themselves chemical engineers, growing the membership of chemical engineering institutions, but they have also contributed to the loss of association with any profession of the title ‘chemical engineer’. At the same time, employers may increasingly hire non-chemical engineers or non-engineers as ‘process engineers’ because they are cheaper than chemical engineering graduates.

How can we distinguish between them? My fellow professionals could be rather inelegantly defined as ‘chemical process engineers with a degree in chemical engineering’, but a more succinct solution might involve the use of upper case.

Essentially, there are ‘Chemical Engineers’ (original meaning), and then there are ‘chemical engineers’, members of the essentially meaningless ‘boundaryless profession’ of ‘chemical engineering’."