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New Zealand Engineering 1998 May

The Global Engineer

Warwick T Bishop is chief executive of IPENZ

There are a number of new factors influencing both the way engineers are employed and the way engineering is undertaken in New Zealand. Just over ten years ago more than half of the membership of the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand, (IPENZ), worked for either local or national government organisations. Today that figure is less than ten percent and shrinking rapidly. Not only are more engineers working in the private sector but many are now working for themselves.

In recent years IPENZ has changed its structure, its membership grades and its staffing to reflect these moves and to better serve the changing needs of members. That membership and all potential members, work in an ever increasing number of diverse roles and organisations. Further changes are going to be necessary to keep IPENZ in line with these rapidly moving worldwide trends.

Like many other professions, engineering is now globalising at a rapid rate in all disciplines - increasingly, engineers need to be able to work anywhere, for anyone and at any time.

Global changes by the profession

New Zealand, through IPENZ, is a signatory to the Washington Accord. This group of eight countries has agreed to recognise the equivalency of each other's accredited engineering education programmes leading to recognised engineering degrees.
That system has been in place and working well for nearly a decade.

A sub-group of the Washington Accord members has formed the Engineers Mobility Forum. This group is looking at ways that these same eight countries, (Australia, Canada, Hong Kong¹, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom and United States of America), can mutually recognise each other's experienced professional engineers. Engineering organisations from Japan and Europe are very interested observers at all these talks.

The challenge facing the profession worldwide is to devise a set of principles and a process whereby substantial equivalence in the competency of experienced engineers wishing to practise internationally can be recognised quickly and efficiently.

One of the most difficult problems facing negotiators will be the perceived, or real, regional issues of `safety' being seen by others as barriers to entry. This is likely to be an on-going issue even after any agreements are signed.

Global changes by Governments
As the next round of World Trade Organisation (WTO) discussions get underway in the year 2000 a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) will be high on the agenda. The WTO is seeking to liberalise and deregulate trade in all professional services. The finance industry already has the accounting profession at the top of its agenda for these talks. Engineering is very likely to be the next profession that will
come under pressure to free up its cross border trading.

The issue to be faced in most countries, in order to enable a freer trade in services, is reduced regulation, not tariffs as it was in freeing up world trade in products. For engineering, the issue will be licensing or registration, and the negotiators will be looking for reduced, or standardised, regulations. There is an implied threat in this process that if the professional bodies in each country do not, or can not, come up with the answers, then the bureaucrats will do it for them! That process is exactly what happened to agricultural products in the GATT Uruguay Round.

Any GATS agreement in professional services will need to be seen as maintaining public safety, health and performance measures. Each signatory will also want to see good mechanisms in place to deal with ethical, disciplinary, competency and quality issues. Furthermore, any licensing or registration process must not be seen to be slow or unduly restrictive, eg. a `barrier to trade' - the medical profession please note!

Running in parallel with this process are many other bilateral and multi-lateral negotiations. New Zealand already has a bilateral arrangement with Australia under CER (The Trans-tasman Mutual Recognition Agreement) and is now beginning to negotiate multilateral trade agreements in both products and services within the Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC).

An APEC agreement could easily end up affecting New Zealand professional services earlier than any worldwide WTO agreement. For instance, the proposed time frames for the introduction of an `APEC Engineer Register' are quite short. The negotiators have already proposed a timetable that would see this Register in place by the end of 1998.

This is an extremely tight schedule that probably will not be achieved but it shows the determination of the governments in the region to keep this agenda under pressure. Despite their other problems many Asian countries are still keen to keep progressing trade liberalisation in the region.

The definition of an `APEC engineer' and a process by which IPENZ and/or the Engineers Registration Board (ERB) recognise and register experienced professionals from other countries, are already a topics of intense international discussion and will soon (by June this year in fact) become extremely urgent issues. For example, the current New Zealand Act needs modifying even to allow the ERB to recognise practising APEC engineers with an offshore address.

Proposed changes in the NZ engineering regulatory regime
The NZ Engineers Registration Act (1924) is long overdue for a major overhaul. It now needs to be totally rewritten in the context of a changed and rapidly changing world. As happened in 1996 with the new Chartered Accountants Act, the term `Registered Professional Engineer', or something similar, needs to be protected in some new `light handed' legislation covering professional engineers. Perhaps the protection of the name `Registered Professional Engineer' is all that any new act really needs to cover. IPENZ could then get on with the job of looking after the rest of the issues facing the New Zealand professional engineers both locally and globally.

While the physical register could easily be administered by IPENZ - and this makes good administrative and economic sense - membership of IPENZ need not, and in this day and age of competitive forces probably should not, be a prerequisite for registration. International agreements will insist that each registered engineer belongs to at least one `recognised' Institution. A `recognised' institution is one that will most likely be based in a signatory country (Washington Accord, APEC, etc.) and it will have a code of ethics, plus an attendant disciplinary procedure, along with extensive continuing professional development requirements imposed on its membership.

The shape of any new regime requires considerable analysis and debate within the profession. For example, what should the relationship between registration and professional membership of a `recognised' professional engineering body be? Should registration be discipline specific? If so, then how specific within a discipline? Who exactly should be allowed to use the term Registered Professional Engineer and under what circumstances? Another key question needing an answer is how should continued competence be assessed, who by and how frequently?
Strategic changes in IPENZ
With all of these global and national changes occurring IPENZ needs to reassess many of its structured processes. The creation of Practice Colleges may now need to be reconsidered as a way of meeting some of the market demands for measured competencies in defined areas. IPENZ must also consider those members who are eligible for the grade of technical member. An increasing number of engineering institutions around the world are following New Zealand's recent changes and broadening their membership base. There is growing scope for cross border recognition at the technologist and technician level.

These factors, and others, are leading IPENZ to reconsider thoroughly all the relationships it has with members, branches and technical groups.

Before IPENZ makes any further changes to its operating structures or strategic direction, a clearer view of the unfolding international scene is needed. All future changes will need to work within a new regulatory framework imposed not only from within New Zealand but also set by international agreements and trends. The impact of the expanding global marketplace on all professionals will be immense. They will have positive and negative elements. At IPENZ we want to make sure that the advantages are recognised and quickly seized by New Zealand professional engineers.

1. Since 1 July 1997 - Hong Kong has become a Special Economic Zone of the People's Republic of China.