Stand Up and Be Counted

The following screed represents the opinion of the editor, not ASFE. Your response is encouraged.

John Doe, Esq. is an attorney.

John Doe, M.D. is a physician.

John Doe, C.P.A. is an accountant.

John Doe, A.I.A. is an architect.

And I suppose you’d expect me to once again say something like

John Doe, P.E. is a licensed professional engineer, except John Doe, P.E. refers to himself only as John Doe, unless the P.E. is required or highly appropriate within a business context.

But I’m not going to say that, because

John Doe is an engineer – and a very good one – but he has no professional designation because he doesn’t need one. He’s exempt. He works for a government agency or an industrial organization, or the kind of engineering he engages in is unregulated; e.g., aerospace engineering, software engineering, biomedical engineering, nuclear engineering, and so on. (Wild, isn’t it? You need a P.E. to design a slab for a double-wide but not to design a nuclear bomb.)

I believe I’m correct in saying that America’s engineers outnumber the nation’s attorneys, physicians, accountants, and architects, but you’d never know it, because those with a designation don’t use it much, and the rest – the majority – have no designation. Wouldn’t all engineers be better off if they at least had some type of honorific (e.g., Esq.) that would readily connote their profession and their status within it? I sure think so, if only because it would make all engineers feel part of an important whole, create more visibility for the profession and its practitioners, and contribute to the prestige that should be associated with what is, arguably, mankind’s most important endeavor.

Actually, creating an appropriate recognition system would not be that difficult. It would require some of the nation’s largest and most prestigious engineering organizations to agree that general recognition of engineers would benefit them all, and to form an agency of some sort – let’s call it the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Engineers (JCAE) – that would function to recognize those who would qualify for an honorific of some sort.

P.E. would not work, because it represents a license that is awarded by a given jurisdiction; most commonly, a state. John Doe, P.E., who is licensed in New York, may actually get himself in trouble should he refer to himself as John Doe, P.E. in New Jersey.

Something like M.D. would not work, because M.D. refers to a graduate degree. Most engineers have not earned master’s degrees, and those who have did not earn them in the same disciplines.

A designation like C.P.A. would not be appropriate, because no common test is available for engineers, given the diversity of their disciplines. And A.I.A. would be out of the question, because engineers are represented by dozens of organizations, a situation that epitomizes the problem: lack of professional unity. In fact, that lack of unity is precisely what has led to engineers’ disproportionate lack of strength and their disturbing inability to respond as a profession when an important, overarching issue arises.

One of today’s overarching issues is the “engineer gap”; i.e., the growing chasm between the number of engineers we have and the number of engineers we need. If we had a lawyer gap, you can bet that attorneys of all kinds – corporate attorneys, plaintiff’s attorneys, divorce attorneys, et al. – would be in middle schools telling students (along with their teachers, counselors, and parents) about the many different types of law one can practice, the marvelous rewards of each, etc. Physicians no doubt would do the same, as would architects and CPAs.

Engineers don’t do that.

When engineers go into the schools at all, they don’t talk about engineering; they talk about their kind of engineering; e.g., how civil engineers are custodians of planet Earth (providing their clients want them to be), how software engineers make tomorrow happen today, and so on.

Why are engineers so oblivious to their roots? I don’t know, but I do know that the result confuses the public and that, as a consequence of their parochial outlooks, far too many major engineering organizations harm the profession in an effort to glorify their own particular sliver of it. But let’s say they are somehow able to rise above all that; that the civil engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical and electronic engineers, chemical engineers, software engineers, aerospace engineers, automotive engineers, et al. were to agree to form the JCEA in order to settle upon a single, unifying honorific. And let’s say, solely for the purpose of discussion, that the honorific the JCAE chose was Accredited Engineering Professional, or A.E.P. P.E.s would automatically become A.E.P.s, and each discipline would establish appropriate educational and/or experiential criteria to establish a means for A.E.P. recognition.

The federal government would be petitioned to invest some money in the effort, and all indications are it’s in a mood to do so. Any number of Senators and Representatives are concerned about our engineer gap, especially given the number of engineers who are entering the workforces of China and India. For the comparatively small sum of, say, $1 billion, the JCAE could mount a $200 million/year effort to gain awareness and recognition for engineers, thereby encouraging more youngsters to enter the field while encouraging more engineers to come out of their closets.

Each engineering discipline would benefit from this effort, because each would gain prestige by being part of a prestigious profession. And because each discipline would gain practitioners, America would benefit.

“We’ve tried to do that,” I’ve heard from a number of leaders in various disciplines, “but the [fill-in-the-blank] engineers aren’t willing to get involved.” If that’s really the case, then, in my judgment, not enough effort has been made. Those who are willing to take the first steps need to band together and, if necessary, publicly embarrass those organizations that put their own interests (or dim-wittedness or laziness) above the interests of the profession and the nation.

If you agree that it’s high time for the nation’s engineers to stand up and be counted, then you have to agree that, first, they need to be visible. Creating something akin to a JCAE and an A.E.P. designation would be an important first step. And who knows where the rest of the journey might lead.