OSPE celebrates Professional Engineers Day!

Whether your professional designation is marked by the letters PE, P.Eng., or ing., to name a few, the common denominator across these titles is the commitment you’ve made as a professional engineer to apply your technical knowledge and problem-solving abilities to develop sound solutions to pressing societal issues, while upholding public welfare and safety.

Professional Engineers Day – August 2, 2017

Today, OSPE joins in on a worldwide celebration of engineering by participating in the National Society of Professional Engineers’ (NSPE) second annual Professional Engineers Day. Professional Engineers Day invites you to help raise awareness about what it means to be a professional engineer and to show your appreciation for the work engineers in all disciplines do every day.

NSPE

How can you participate? Using the hashtag #LicensedPEDay, simply upload a photo or video to social media that highlights the work you do, explains why you decided to become a professional engineer, or educates your colleagues about the importance of becoming a licensed professional engineer.

NSPEAccording to the NSPE, last year’s #LicensedPEDay campaign garnered 130 Instagram posts, over 500 Facebook posts and nearly 2,000 tweets. Building on the success of its inaugural campaign, the NSPE’s 2017 initiative strives to generate even more buzz online by offering several news ways for you to get involved and show off what you do.

Visit the NSPE’s official PE Day website to access Facebook frames and other shareable graphics that you can use online today to showcase your professional pride!

Curious what OSPE and the NSPE have in common?

While the NSPE is the national advocacy organization for professional engineers across the United States, recent conversations with our colleagues south of the border demonstrate that both OSPE and the NSPE—including the individual state societies of which the NSPE is comprised—share many similarities in terms of advocacy priorities and membership challenges.

Not unlike the four pillars of OSPE’s Strategic Plan, the NSPE champions the PE licence, stands as the ethical guide to the profession, facilitates professional advancement and unites the PE community.

“Much like the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, the NSPE is supported through voluntary membership,” says NSPE executive director Mark Golden, CAE, FASAE. “We rely on the expertise and contributions of our members to strengthen our advocacy efforts. If there is one thing we’ve learned, it’s that it comes down to strength in numbers. Getting more PEs involved in advocacy means more effective outreach, more recognition, and consequently, more opportunities to share our message.”

According to the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES), there are more than 820,000 licensed professional engineers in the United States. As of 2017, the NSPE has a total membership of 31,000 professional engineers. The NSPE’s compositional state societies vary in size and as a result, have differing capacities for promoting member involvement in their respective jurisdictions.

“While we would certainly like to see our membership numbers continue to grow, we are pleased to note that in recent years, we are communicating more frequently with all our members and are seeing more engagement than in the past,” Golden adds. “Even if this engagement simply involves reading about what’s going on or clicking on links when updates and inquiries go out, simply paying more attention to the advocacy work that is being done makes a big difference in the long run as we try to generate stronger, more effective advocacy outcomes.”

With an overall increase in similar types of engagement from our own membership base, OSPE has also been able to generate more fruitful conversations and drive productive change on behalf of our members. Your guest blog contributions, additions to OSPE’s Canada 150 list, letters to the editor, blog comments, emails to OSPE and social media posts, all inform the Society’s media outreach and government relations activities.

Energy
OSPE President Jonathan Hack, P.Eng., and Past President Paul Acchione, P.Eng., shared the results of OSPE’s energy system analysis at Queen’s Park on June 29, 2017.

OSPE’s June 29th energy announcement, for example, relied on input from OSPE’s energy task force and garnered at least 20 media hits, helping bring to light how critical it is that engineers are consulted from the outset of public policy-making. With a provincial election on the horizon in 2018, stay tuned as OSPE will be seeking your input to help ensure that all three political leaders appreciate and involve Ontario’s engineers as their parties commit to policies that will determine the future growth and prosperity of the province.

In addition to similarities in member engagement across our Societies, OSPE and the NSPE also share a number of similar advocacy objectives. Whether it involves raising awareness about the value and integrity of licensure; promoting Qualifications-Based Selection (QBS) to ensure that service providers are retained on the basis of qualifications rather than price factors; advocating for greater economic opportunities for professional engineers; or involving professional engineers in the development of effective energy systems and innovative transportation infrastructure, it is clear that engineers around the world can benefit from knowledge sharing.

So together with our colleagues around the globe, let’s take up the challenge to raise awareness about the important work engineers do by taking the time today to highlight examples of Canadian and Ontario-based engineering innovation using #LicensedPEDay. OSPE also encourages you to showcase your professional pride year-round using OSPE’s own #AnEngineerWasHere hashtag to share your projects, research and ideas with the world!

AnEngineerWasHere

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Peter Rapin

    “…commitment you’ve made as a professional engineer to apply your technical knowledge and problem-solving abilities to develop sound solutions to pressing societal issues, while upholding public welfare and safety.”
    The problem I have with this statement is the omission of any reference to the engineer’s client or employer. Are you suggesting that “pressing social issues” are the only driving force or acceptable endeavor?

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