Common in Britain, it is also used in Ireland, the United States and the Commonwealth, and has been adopted by organizations around the world.
[9] In the UK and other countries that follow its model, the professional bodies overseeing chartered statuses have a duty to act in the public interest, rather than in the interests of their members, ensuring that chartered professionals must meet ethical standards of behaviour.
[10][11] As a status, rather than simply a qualification, a chartered title may be removed for failure to adhere to codes of conduct, or lost through non-renewal.
[12][13] Many chartered statuses require initial academic preparation, normally to bachelor's level but sometimes to master's level (or equivalent experience) in engineering and scientific fields where an integrated master's degree is the standard first degree.
[6][7][8][16][17] In the UK, the Privy Council has stated that its policy is "that the criteria for individual Chartered Status should be broadly similar across the professions".
Chartered professional titles are normally only permitted to be registered as collective trade marks.
[32] Chartered Engineer (or a derivative) is also used in the official translation of titles from Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Iceland and Slovakia, while Chartered Accountant (or a derivative) is used in the official translation of titles from Austria, France, Hungary, Iceland, and Romania.
Nevertheless, the mere designation of membership of a Society has not, in recent years, been found to convey that definite idea of professional status to which the public is accustomed.
This was a sharp contrast to the situation in the Commonwealth, where accountants in South Africa and Australia had been engaged in a decades-long struggle to gain the right to use a chartered title that came to fruition at about the same time.
[55] This expansion was driven less by occupational closure than a desire to demonstrate professional equality with the engineers.
The Chartered Physicist status, for example, has, since 2001, required a master's degree to fulfill the academic preparation and is no longer awarded automatically to all corporate members of the Institute of Physics,[59] and since 2012 has required evidence of CPD to be presented to renew the status every 3 years.
[61] The Chartered Scientist title, introduced in 2004, required a master's degree and annual re-validation through evidence of CPD from the start.