I spent two days at an engineering conference presented last week by the Engineers Foundation of Ohio to earn required continuing education hours for my PE license. While none of the topics themselves left me completely disinterested, some of the classes were better executed than others.
A partner and an associate of a law firm that handles labor and employment law gave four presentations during the first day. Three of the presentations had little content that I had not been exposed to: Federal Labor Standards Act, Workers Compensation, and Litigation Avoidance. The third out of the four, Social Networking for Engineering Business, gave some of the legal issues about using Facebook and other social networking sites to prescreen interviewers. All four presentations served to open a window into the aggressiveness of the partner, which I suppose can be a good advertisement.
Interesting notes from the social networking topic: it’s not legal to be sneaky and initiate a “friend” request for the purposes of gathering information about an applicant. If you’re open and honest about who you are when you seek to “friend” them, that information’s fair game. If you’re looking for a job, you probably don’t want to admit that you “use the herb” on Facebook, as happened in a class example.
The law firm advised, contrary to our common sense, to use social networking sites to do research on personnel after the company has extended the person a conditional offer (but before they are hired, of course). There has been some success by people who, once they found out an employer saw their social networking information and refused to offer them a job, sued saying the employer found out the applicant was a member of a protected class (e.g. disability) and thus discriminated against that class.
The topic of the lunch session was How the Stimulus Package Has Impacted Engineering Employment. There hasn’t been much impact yet, because half the money still hasn’t been spent.
The second morning started off with The Impact of Fiscal & Monetary Policy on Engineering. The presenter tried very hard to stay apolitical, but I found his simple acceptance of Keynesian principles disconcerting. The topic dovetailed into a discussion of the banking derivatives crunch, which was interesting. There were some terrific incentives for failure, and we had no business giving money to AIG and others when their questionable practices failed.
The lunch session was a regulatory update from the State Board of Registration. There is a desire by some on the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying to increase the requirements for a professional engineer. There is talk of adding 30 hours of college courses in addition to the bachelor’s degree, thus calling it BS+30. This would have to be legislated in each state.
I think this is a terrible idea for a few reasons. Engineering graduates already accumulate five years of experience before they can apply for the PE exam. If our engineers are incompetent because college coursework is inadequate, then we need to fix the college degree programs. Secondly, once an engineer starts work, his work may be of a nature that he can’t attend college courses, like if he’s 24-hour on-call. Finally, there will be some states that require BS+30 and some that don’t, increasing the hassle of maintaining licenses in multiple states. I’m not affected by it because I’m grandfathered in, but there will be incentive for engineers to go to grad school and then start working, rather than going to work right away.
The course on Engineer-Environment Interactions: Unintended Consequences really provided no unintended consequences but rather solicited discussion on alternative technologies.
The last course, Applied Ethics in Engineering as a Natural/Scientific Process, showed different ethical assessments and ethical approaches to justifying moral behavior. It was a good session, because one can see just how much and how little “good” is written on the human heart.
Overall, the conference was good. I would really like to see more topics along the lines of technological advancement and feedback to schools as to what technical topics schools can teach to better prepare graduates.
As a software guy, licensing and certification give me the willies. The term engineer should probably never have been applied to us.
I totally agree. Engineer is almost a useless term in job search engines.
Funny story: when I hired on at Halliburton nearly 13 years ago now(!) my title was Well Site Engineer. I was an engineer, doing engineering things and having an engineering degree. Then the move was made to standardize positions all across the company, which included a government construction subsidiary named Brown and Root. B&R demanded that nobody be called an engineer unless they had a PE registration (I didn’t that early into my career), and so I went from a Well Site Engineer to a Technical Professional.
We have Senior Technical Professionals, Technical Professionals, and Associate Technical Professionals now. For the humor, abbreviate those titles.