In military parlance, the above is the equivalent of the officer fresh out of the academy complaining about the 20 year veteran NCO.
There's a good reason most site managers, even non-tertiary qualified ones, are more valued and much better remunerated than engineering grads that decided to join commercial construction companies through the construction/project management stream.
You just can't replicate experience, especially when managing other trades/problems and most of them have the boots on the ground experience over years and years.
I work on the basis that once a competent person has ten years plus experience it should be near impossible to determine whether they came up through trade or did a four year degree.
The whole idea of the master's program where I used to work was to accelerate the growth of junior engineers into senior engineers, while also giving the most talented senior technical people a pathway to becoming a professional engineer.
The problem is EA doesn't like people who don't have four year engineering degrees being recognised as engineers. They don't even like people who did their four year degrees in many other countries being recognised as engineers.
Prior to the existence of EA, many engineers had three year diplomas from the various Institutes of Technology, while others had qualified through pupillage, i.e. a professional apprenticeship. By all means have people sit exams and professional boards to qualify, but making them suck eggs in a classroom for four years full time, or eight to twelve years part time, is nothing more than a deliberate policy to make it too hard for those who didn't go to the right uni and do the right courses in the right classes under the right instructors to gain professional recognition for their demonstrated knowledge, skills and competence.
With the current skills shortages we should be bringing as many people as possible into, or back to engineering, identifying gaps in their knowledge and experience and bridging/filling them, instead of excluding them.