Identify engineering companies that value technical excellence
This note will describe how you can create a shortlist of engineering consultancies that technically excel amongst their peers. There are two measures we can use to rank companies – award winning projects and number of chartered engineers.
Ranking engineering companies by number of award-winning projects
One way to determine whether a company is technically excellent is to review their past projects and see if they have been recognised by the industry. There are a number of bodies that review and award engineering projects, but for technical excellence, the most significant awards are those awarded by the professional institutions – for structural and civil engineering, the IStructE and ICE respectively.
There are two approaches you could take to this – if there is a specific company you are interested in, the company website should advertise their award winning projects. For example, if you are interested in Buro Happold, their website has a search function (https://www.burohappold.com/search?_sf_s=istructe) . By searching for ‘IstructE’ we find that Buro Happold were shortlisted for 6 IStructE awards in 2019, and won the ‘Supreme Award’.
You can tell a lot from a potential employers website. Do they celebrate their work, and is it recognised and awarded by the professional institutions?
If you would like to create a shortlist of companies that have achieved at the IstructE awards, the IstructE has a page documenting past winners (https://www.istructe.org/structural-awards/winners/past-winners/).
In recent years the IstructE has updated its award categories a number of times, with a current focus on sustainability. Previously awards were given based on category of structure. In 2020 no awards were held due to the COVID pandemic.
Below is a table that summarises the engineering companies that have won these awards from some of the most prominent categories. It may be that one or two of these categories are particularly inspiring to you. By focusing on one or two categories that inspire you, its possible to create a list of award-winning companies that work on projects that interest and excite you.
Some of the companies that appear multiple times are worth noting – BuroHappold, Arup, Webb Yates Engineers and Eckersley O’Callaghan among others. These are clearly companies that place high importance on technical excellence.
Ranking engineering companies by number of chartered engineers
Individually, technical excellence can be defined by achieving chartered status by your respective engineering institution. If we can understand how many chartered engineers there are at a company, we get an indication of how much expertise that company has.
There are a couple of ways to try and understand this.
Firstly, if you happen to have a job interview with a company and one of your priorities is technical excellence, it is a good idea to ask how many chartered engineers work at the company. If the interviewer doesn’t directly answer the question, or provides a vague answer, it’s probably because they know the company has a shortcoming in that area.
We can get an indication of this number in other ways. The online publication building.co.uk publishes an annual list of the UK’s top 150 consultants, and top 50 engineers, ranked by total number of chartered staff. For each company featured, the number of chartered staff, as well as total number of engineering staff is tabled. So we can see total number of chartered staff but also calculate the percentage of the total engineering staff that are chartered.
This table is located behind a paywall on the website, but slightly older editions can be found through a google search. The table shows that some of the large well known engineering companies (Mott MacDonald, AECOM, Arup, Ramboll, BuroHappold, Elliot Wood) have somewhere around half of their engineering staff being chartered engineers. This could be considered a very high level of expertise.
For some smaller, well performing companies (AKTII, Price and Myers, Robert Bird) this percentage is closer to 25%. It should be noted that participation in the survey is voluntary and not all engineering companies participate.
If you are prioritising working for a company that highly values technical expertise, you should try to find out what percentage of engineering staff at the company are chartered. If it is 25% or more, then you can be satisfied that you will be working within a company that takes technical excellence seriously, and will support you becoming a chartered engineer.
Note by Will W
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