Wow you have to have a graduate degree to even be an eligible employee, never mind.
There are problems though: it leads to very early specialisation (when someone fresh out of school may still not be exactly sure what they want to do) and makes it difficult to hop between different trades/jobs (since you need to re-train in a lot of cases).
Or later, they could click on the 'Investor' link
Other engineering fields have less opportunities for self-taught people and innovation in those fields are driven by people with higher degrees.
Thereby proving that the emperor has no clothes.
When I was applying to grad schools in the US, my French undergrad was not recognized as a proper undergrad - it had to be a 5 year Master (I snuck around that restriction by spending a year in the UK and getting a british BSc).
But of course, French institutions consider 4 years american degrees to be equivalent to 3 year French degrees (rightfully so in their mind - after all, French people don't waste anytime declaring their major or taking general ed classes, which they have taken in high school; their class load also tends to be higher)
Tl;dr each country thinks their degree is better than the other's
In Quebec there's a stage between secondary school, and post secondary which lasts 2-3 years.
In terms of years, it looks like this: Primary:1-6 Secondary:6-11 Pre-Post Secondary: 12-13 Post Secondary 14-17(14-18 for engineering/etc.)
In the end they are equivalent, however differently structured.
For example, I've found the average MIT or Stanford BSc to be in a similar league as the average French student from a top 5-year school (eg INSA Lyon, Polytechnique, ETH Zürich, etc).
On the other hand, the average engineer out of a state university BSc is not quite as good as the average engineer out of a French public university licence program.
As I understand it, at the end of school Scottish students take "Higher" exams, and then can either apply to university then, or continue in school and take "Advanced Higher" exams first. And often people doing the latter can skip the first year of university. (As well as people from the UK with good A-level results.)
So while there's the possibility to do an extra year, I think in practice it's mostly equivalent to the UK system.
Highers are taken at the end of 5th year - with the 6th year being used for topping up results if they weren't good enough, acquiring Advanced Highers - which are quite often not really required and going to parties...
Some people go to Uni right after the highers (my wife did this and regretted it) and some go into second year directly with Advanced Highers - but very few people I know do either. Schools certainly recommend against both.
It sounds like you have far more experience of this, so thanks for elaborating.
We don't have people calling themselves engineers just because can type a few lines of code.
The education system should be giving you clues on who you should hire. But it doesn't fulfill its mission at all.
I do a lot of hiring and, in my experience, having a degree (or indeed the class/score of said degree) has no relation to the real-world abilities of candidates.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_des_titres_d%27ing%...
In France "Ingénieur" is also a civil servant title, or a title given to someone who did that job and is now retired (I am "Ingénieur honoraire" and have a master but no "Ingénieur" diploma).
Oh, it's fun if they went to the school I dropped out of [I don't mention that I don't have a degree]. "Is professor Xyztmxl still teaching the OS course, and can any students understand him at all?" Good times, at the end of an interview, when things went well.
But education is almost always irrelevant. I prefer seeing wide-and-deep experience in someone from a no-name school to someone from MIT/Caltech/whatever who's just been pootering around on some narrow Java project for years.
I dropped out of uni in my last year due to family/personal issues but I've been working in tech for over 12 years now. I've never needed to show a degree here in the UK but back home (Spain) it used to be an issue. Recently the opportunity to relocate to the USA came up with my employer but I sort of rejected the offer since I assumed that getting a visa might be a bit of a hassle without a degree.
So yes, as silly as I think it is, I do think overall it's worth it.
If you want to do it while working, I can highly recommend the Open University. While I didn't really learn anything I didn't already know with a Computing degree, there is a large choice of courses, the course materials were really good, and the remote tutoring system works well.
An engineer is anyone who uses technology to solve a problem. Now there's a massive spectrum of quality there, but a piece of paper or two and some classwork doesn't make you an engineer. Or even a particularly good engineer. Just the other day I explained how Hash Tables work to someone with a Masters.
Should I make a list?
From my admittedly limited exposure to the continent and knowing my sister's experience with Swiss Bureaucracy, I can only imagine European government workers get high off the ink from all the rubber stamps required.
I guess if you're a bureaucrat designing a visa, requiring a degree makes sense. But saying that people lacking degrees aren't good engineers is crazy.
Btw, when English is borrowing words from other languages they also tend to undergo a significant semantic shift. It's a two way street.