Lately I’ve seen posts on LinkedIn regarding the barriers to entry posed by licensing. Licensure as a Professional Engineer (PE) requires a bachelor’s degree from an accredited engineering curriculum, an 8-hour Fundamentals exam, a number of years of relevant experience under the supervision of a PE, and an 8-hour Principles and Practice of Engineering exam. Thanks to the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) Model Law, these licensing guidelines are common throughout the US. That makes it easier to obtain licensure in multiple states. Both exams are also common throughout the country, so once you pass them you don’t have to take them again when you apply in another state.
Some states have additional requirements. A common one is an exam on ethics and that state’s laws governing professional practice. A few states require attestation from law enforcement of one’s lack of a criminal record, or a set of fingerprints so they can check with the FBI. Some require you to demonstrate expertise in engineering for local conditions, such as seismic activity in California or arctic conditions in Alaska.
Preparing for the exams
You can take the Fundamentals exam before you graduate from university. It makes sense to take it as soon as you’ve completed the relevant course work. That way the material is relatively fresh in your mind, and you’re used to taking tests. It will never be easier.
On the other hand, you can’t take the Principles and Practice of Engineering exam until you’ve met the experience requirement. Most states require 4 years or so of increasingly responsible experience. The main difference among them is how they count those years. For example, a master’s degree may count as 1 year of experience. You may or may not be able to count your summer jobs during graduate school. And the qualifications for who counts as an acceptable supervisor may vary from state to state. In any case, by the time you’re eligible to take the PE exam you’ll have been out of school for several years and your studying- and test-taking skills will be rusty.
You can study for the PE exam on your own, but I recommend taking a review course. When you’re working full time and managing life outside work, it can be hard to make time to study. Also, you may not know where to concentrate your efforts for the best results. A review course will help you focus on the right things. The course I took also included test-taking strategies, which were invaluable. At the time, my specialty wasn’t well represented on the exam, so almost all of the questions were outside my area of expertise. The course helped me prepare for them and equipped me to pass on my first try.
Register with NCEES early in your career
Collecting the documentation for your first PE license can be time consuming. You need an official transcript of your academic record and letters of recommendation from five people who are familiar with your work as well as passing scores on both exams. You also have to account for all of the time since graduation from university. This includes periods of unemployment and jobs that don’t count toward the professional experience requirement.
But with an NCEES council record, you don’t have to repeat the process every time you apply for a license in a different state. You simply submit your documentation to the council. They carefully vet everything. Once that’s done, applying for additional licenses is just a matter of requesting them to forward your record to the new state. State boards normally accept a council record without further vetting, so they don’t take long—sometimes less than a week—to issue the license.
Start your council record early in your career and keep it up to date. Documenting all of your experience necessitates obtaining letters from everyone you’ve worked for since graduation. The more time you have to cover, the likelier you’ll have lost touch with a former supervisor. Worse, some may have died in the interim.
By the time I applied for my first PE license, I had lived outside the US for nearly five years. My work in Norway and Canada didn’t count because my supervisors weren’t licensed in the US. Even so, I still had to get them to attest to my professional competence and character. It took almost a year—and repeated requests—to obtain letters from everyone I’d worked for. My Norwegian and Canadian supervisors didn’t realize that NCEES wouldn’t approve my record without their documentation.
Maintaining your licenses
Particularly when you have more than one state license, it can be difficult to maintain them all. Renewal dates vary from state to state, as do the specifics of the continuing education requirements. Some require a certain number of hours of ethics or business instruction along with the technical courses. For example, Minnesota requires 2 hours of ethics instruction during each 2-year renewal period. Local professional societies provide that instruction within the renewal period. But if you have to meet a similar requirement in a state with a different renewal date, it may be hard to find a course you can complete in time.
NCEES helps there, too, by maintaining a record of your continuing education credits. You can list the states where you have licenses on their dashboard, along with the renewal dates. The dashboard automatically populates the education requirements for each state. You enter the courses you took and upload the certificates. You can see at a glance how many credits you have of each type for each state. That way you know whether you’re on track to complete the requirements by the deadline.