It's all in the 'title'
In the UK there are two types of people - ordinary folks and "professionals" who are able to sign off official documents like passports.
The professionals, it has been deemed, are a very select, especially trustworthy group that include teachers, doctors and farmers ...
As a person, who did a degree and a year's teacher training course and qualified last year at 23, I could sign off that passport as a 'professional person'.
As a person who is 18 and has land given to them by the family and farms it, I could sign off that passport as a 'professional person'.
As a person with the same degree as the teacher, a Masters, 20 years in industry, 10 years running my own company and the same size piece of land as the farmer that's a landscape garden, I'm not "professional" because my face doesn't fit ...
The refusal of the badge "engineer" is in my view the same - snobbery of the term.
At the local FE college the (less than) civil engineers, who have never been out of the office and wouldn't recognise a bridge if you hit them with it, refuse to refer to the staff in the mechanical engineering department as 'engineers' because they do not pay to be part of a professional body and have a shiny badge ... The fact that the mechanical engineers could design and manufacture the equipment to build the civil engineer's bridge seems to escape them ...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
