In the most recent poll on occupational prestige in Germany conducted by the Allensbach Institute engineers and university professors took seventh place, behind physicians and craftsmen, but well ahead of politicians and journalists.
26% of Germans polled noted a high degree of respect for the engineering profession. No wonder, for Germans define individual prestige based on technical (specialized) knowledge.
Almost every third supervisory board member of a DAX30 company is an engineer by training. Industrial heavyweights like Volkswagen and DaimlerBenz have always been run by engineers, to the dismay, as the magazine Spiegel wrote, of those colleagues with a business or legal background.
