I know that electrical engineers have a lot more education than electricians, but what is the difference in terms of real world ability?
Are there things that electrical engineers can do that electricians can’t? Both would probably be able to fix a broken VCR, for example. But is the engineer able to build stuff the electrician can’t?
And what IS the difference in training between the two?
Just a guess but I thought that electricians were the hands on people who did repair, maintenance, and installation of things electrical.
Electrical Engineers were more into the invention, planning, design of things electrical.
Actaully, most electrical engineers probably couldn’t fix a broke VCR. They’d know the theory but wouldn’t have much hands on practice. (my father’s favortie story from studying to be an EE was his mother constantly asking him to fix the TV)
What Hampshire said is pretty much it. EE design circuits, etc., electricians fix and install it electrical stuff. And as far as knowing why it all works, the EE will be able to tell you the theory, the electrician will have a lot of practical rules-of-thumb but probably not much of an understanding. (based on the electricians I’ve known)
EE is a LOT of stuff.
It has to do with designing cicuits (designing that VCR). They also do things like create microchip designs, do research on medical imaging, do image processing. They might design a lens for a telescope. They’re probably responsible for JPEG, MP3, sonograms, PET scans, MRIs, and your stereo system.
I did some EE research for a while. I was working on processing PET scan images. Then, I was working on video conferencing software. Both were (kind of) under the umbrella “electrical engineering”.
An electrician installs your ceiling fan, and grounds your outlets.
I’m an EE.
EE’s design such things as digital and analog circuits, microwave communication systems, and signal processing systems, just to name a few. EE’s can also be found doing research, testing, and analysis.
An electronic technician is more hands-on than an EE. An electronic technician stuffs PCBs, solders, repairs, and troubleshoots electrical/electronic systems. An electronic technician also performs testing.
An electrician is someone who wires a building. They’re hands-on, and they understand the NEC.
There is a difference between ‘electrical’ and ‘electronic’; ‘electrical’ implies the bulk handling of electricity as a source of power; ‘electronic’ implies the use of electricity as a means of conveying control and information. A lot of power need not be incolved.
Electricians handle construction, maintenance, and (I think) design of electrical power systems. Electricians can be found up in the roof of factories connecting three-phase power to weldiong machines, as well as repairing the outlets in your kitchen.
Electronics engineers design things, usually a much larger variety of things than electricians; they design computers, appliances, electronic devices, radio antennas, comunications protocols, signal formats, and on and on.
Electronics technologists design test equipment and test programs for the devices designed by the engineers. Electronics technicians follow pre-designed procedures to test and repair electronic devices; they usually do not design things.
Electrical engineers are not just confined to designing electronic circuits, etc. They also are heavily involved in the design of building electrical systems that the electrician is going to install. EEs calculate electrical loads and specify the proper load center size, determining what is connected where in order to maintain load balance. EEs also help design power distribution systems, including electrical generation stations, substations, etc. Us two-wire types look at the drawings and specs they generate and put it all together.
People have already adequately covered the difference between an EE and an electrician (and a EET or electronics tech) but I’m compelled to offer an additional perspective from across the aisle in the Mechanical Engineering section.
Most people who aren’t familiar with mechanical engineering think that we all design cars. “Hey, can you fix my engine.” Er, yeah, okay…looks like a blown bearing transformer to me; maybe you should take that down to Pep Boys and…uh…have the serpintine shaft replaces. 
Seriously, while I’m a fair shade tree mechanic, at least as far as Volvos and Subarus go, the only class in university I had that even touched on the mechanical workings of internal combusion engines was a lab in which we had to measure the brake horsepower out of a turbocharged diesel. We had some thermodynamic theory on the Otto and Diesel cycle, and some general coverage in cam design (but not specifically for engines), but that’s the extent of what most engineers know about your car engine.
In the “Senior Survey” class (a lecture hall seminar which mostly consisted of various alumni coming to lecture us on what the real world was like) we had one speaker who asked the class how many had ever changed their own oil. A few hands went up–distressingly few, actually–so then he asked how many had ever opened the car hood and looked at the engine. A few more hands went up, but the sum total was that less than a third of the class had actually even looked at an engine.
Seriously.
Whoa. I mean, I’d fallen into mech. eng. after drifting through physics, mathematics, computers science, and electrical engineering, so it wasn’t exactly my life’s dream, but heck, at least I’d turned a few bolts in my time. I wouldn’t trust most of these kids with a phillips head screwdriver. A couple years after my freshman year the School of Engineering started having incoming students take an “Intro to Engineering” class where they had to disassemble electrical and IC motors, air conditioners, and so forth, so hopefully future batches of engineers will be better acquainted with the internal workings of ordinary devices than were my compatriots, but if someone tells you that they are a mechanical engineer, I wouldn’t go inviting them to change a tire, much less operating on an ailing powertrain.
As for EEs, there are a few I’ve met that I doubt could even put together a simple band-pass filter, much less design a complex circuit. The field covers a lot of ground beyond basic circuit design, into power generation, VLSI, semi-conductor materials science, and even applied quantum mechanics. VCR repair, however, is probably not on the list of undergraduate courses.
Stranger
I’m curious about this one. Why would an EE design a lens? Not that it couldn’t happen, but aren’t there other specializations that would be more likely to do that kind of work?
Not if it’s an electronically adaptive lens.
The EE training HAS been fairly useful for optics. Classical Optics is 90% trig. AC circuits is about 85% trig.
I’ve seen my share of engineers who were educated far beyond thier intelligence. Managment trainees we call them. Most of them are dumb-squared: So dumb they don’t know how dumb they are.
Heck, some of the people I’ve had lab with couldn’t even find a screwdriver.
My university offers an internal combustion engine elective, but I think it’s mostly theory. Most of my knowledge about cars has come from my dad and experience - when something is wrong with my Jeep, I’ll research it so that I’ll at least understand what’s happening, even if I can’t fix it myself.
Back to the OP: the other posters in the thread pretty much covered it. I was a computer science/computer engineering major before I switched to mechanical engineering, so most of my experience with the EE department was limited just to circuit design.
Electricians make more and work shorter hours.l
Not sure how accurate this is, but I once heard the B-2 bomber was the first aircraft designed by EE’s. The reasoning was that the B-2 cannot “fly on its own”… it is inherently unstable, and the only way to make it fly is to implement hundreds of sensors and a handful of closed loop control systems.
I was primarily thinking about working out the filtering properties of the lens. They wouldn’t be grinding the lens, but I imagine an EE would be able to manipulate the properties of the lens at the design stage, or the combination of multiple lenses that might go into a telescope.
They design “collimators” for nuclear imaging, but that’s not really a lens.
And, like sewalk said, an electronically adaptive lens would be something that an EE handles. Those, IINM, are lenses that might be actually be made out of mercury, or employ mercury to orient the lens. The lens responds to changes in the atmostphere to provide a cleaner image.
Others would know more about this than I.
All modern military fighter aircraft are unstable. The F-16A/B used analog computers to interface the pilot with the control surfaces. I don’t know if the C/D models were still analog or if they switched to digital. The B-2 was designed by EEs, so to speak, because the thing was specifically designed to have as small a radar return signature as possible. The electronic flight control system was a piece of cake by comparision and flying wings had already been built with mechanical/hydraulic flight controls.
And they also get killed more often on the job.
My friend is an electrician, and he can tell some horrifying stories, like the time his co-worker dropped a screwdriver into a 600-volt three-phase industrial power-supply circuit. The circuit was shorted out and the screwdriver was vapourised in what might as well be called a bolt of lightning.
Then there was the time he and another co-worker got trapped inside a transformer when some world-class idjit cut off the red lockout tag (and lock) to switch the thing on. They found themselved eurrounded by humming masses of high-voltage metal which they could not touch on pain of electrocution, and they could not get out. They yelled and screamed for 45 minutes until someone heard them and shut the power off.
The idjit was fired tout-suite. And my friend and his buddy were off work sick for two weeks because their bodies had been screwed up by the magentic fields inside the transformer.
My friend is now doing something safer. He’s learning how to operate a nuclear power plant. 
This sort of thing does not happen in the world of digital logic, RF links, and firmware, where I work. And that’s the difference between electrics and electronics.
On a semi-related note, when I was a Civil Engineer, people would ask me all kinds of questions about the structural integrity of stuff just by LOOKING at it. For the most part, if it looks like it’s about to come down to you, it looks the same to me. If you want to know if a particular structure would survive a particular load on it, I would need a lot more information, least of all the building plans.
On a quasi-related note:
Powerplants are pretty dangerous places. I did a six-month stint in the offices of a power company. While I was there, several wind turbine towers got hit by lightning or were otherwise “roman-candleized” and one geothermal plant exploded (the high-pressure intake pipe ruptured…loudly). My boss was telling me that the superheated water is under so much pressure that the spray from a pinhole leaks can essentiall behave like a laser or piano wire and sever anything that happens to wander through it.
No analogy is perfect but I (newly minted EE) think a similar question could be asked of MDs and nurses. Nurses and electricians are a bit more limited in the range of specialties compared to the more educated engineers and doctors. Some doctors may never see a patient just as some engineers may never measure a volt or draw a resistor squiggle. There’s countless specialties.
I’m a Chemical Engineer, but my college is weird.
It was created in 1915. Back then, people came out of college being engineers, chemists or physicists without having set foot in a lab or touched a screwdriver, so this guy decided to start giving some postgrad classes on “how to use a beaker” and similar stuff - things that should have been basic but weren’t.
In the '30s, they started undergrad classes, with an enormous focus on labwork. Each of the three possible branches gets 60% of their hours for the 5th and final grade as labwork; in other engineering or science schools you’re lucky to get 20%.
I always make fun of my electronic engineer friends because I can solder better than them since Electronics Lab was compulsory for us.