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California has a convoluted engineering statute that needs fixing. For many years, reasonable legislative initiatives proposed by the PE board, legislators, and other interests have failed due, in large part, to testimony and political influence from factions within the engineering profession in California...
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Many in the engineering licensure community have for decades bemoaned the fact that the percentage of engineering faculty licensed as professional engineers has been declining. This continuing trend is due to a variety of factors, outlined in a previous article . A new, and brilliant, idea is coming...
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In recent years, tremendous strides have been made in engineering licensure in the U.S. to promote mobility and expedited comity licensure for individual PE licenses. In many states, a PE who meets the definition of a Model Law Engineer, and has an up to date “ Council Record ” through the...
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A trend among states to allow early taking of the PE exam is accelerating. For many years, California has allowed candidates to take the PE exam in preparation for licensure after only two years of engineering experience. In recent years, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico have allowed candidates to take...
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A number of years ago, NSPE reinvented itself, as most organizations do periodically, and adopted a new set of mission, vision, and goal statements . At that time, based on the specific verbiage of NSPE’s goals, my thought was that NSPE had “turned inward,” focusing on cooperation with...
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Licensure among engineering faculty members has been on the decline in many institutions for decades. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which are as follows: Blurring of engineering and science. Many faculty members with Ph.D.s in engineering have academic backgrounds in science rather...
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The Oklahoma State Board of Licensure for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors has proposed a novel approach to recognize the advanced qualifications of structural engineers who have passed the 16-hour structural engineering examination. The proposal and its rationale are presented in detail on...
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The NSPE Licensure and Qualifications for Practice Committee has proposed that the NSPE Board of Directors and House of Delegates consider adopting a new policy regarding industrial exemptions. The rationale for proposing the policy is as follows: “In the forty years prior to the 1960s, 41 states...
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An earlier article addressed the often claimed myth in the engineering profession that 80% of engineering graduates work as engineers in industry. That article didn’t present any data, just a compelling hypothesis that engineering graduates go into many lines of work. Now, here is some more specific...
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Canadian professional engineers in the western and maritime provinces have for many years worked closely with U.S. PE boards—mostly in border states—to foster mobility for Canadian engineers in the U.S., and for U.S. engineers in Canada. It has long been a sticking point with Canadian engineers...
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About 40 engineering licensure jurisdictions in the U.S. now require continuing professional development for renewal of PE licenses, and most professional engineers are now regularly accumulating professional development hours, or PDHs. The rules in almost every state are flexible, and purposely so....
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There are two axioms that are often cited regarding the engineering profession. One is that only about 20% of those who graduate with a B.S. in engineering in the U.S. go on to become licensed professional engineers. This one is true. The second, and a corollary to the first, is that 80% of engineering...
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At the 2010 Annual Meeting of the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, NCEES leaders continued discussions regarding the details of the engineering educational requirements in the Model Law as of 2020. In 2006, NCEES modified its Model Law to require, as of 2020, a B.S. in engineering...
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NSPE Executive Director Larry Jacobson presented the below statement on August 31 to the Reactor and Fuel Cycle Technology Subcommittee of the Department of Energy’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future . President Obama directed Energy Secretary Steven Chu to establish the...
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Take this for what it is, the opinion of one person who is not from Texas, and for what little it may be worth because of that. Texas engineers are currently discussing an initiative of structural engineers in Texas to establish discipline-specific licensure for structural engineers. Texas has historically...