I have been practicing mechanical engineering for more than 50 years, the last 27 years as a PE, and have yet to see an instance where public safety in Virginia was placed at risk by a deficiency in the PE program.

The posted comments show an overwhelming response from Virginia professional engineers strongly objecting to the proposed continuing education mandate. On the surface it may sound like a good idea, for the protection of the general public, that the State should mandate that practicing professionals be required to maintain their competence by attending formal training sessions on a regular basis. Why should a strong negative response come from a group of professionals who are so well known to be ethical, responsible, dedicated, objective, rational and typically non-emotional? Some very sound reasons exist:

A practicing professional engineer, after earning his (or her) credentials, continues the normal practice of adding to his professional knowledge and skills because of an intrinsic personal need for knowledge and understanding of the physical world, pride in his profession and the need to stay competitive. He knows that an engineer who does not stay current in his chosen area will eventually lose his usefulness. He is naturally surprised and resentful that a govenrment agency should propose to institute a requirement that is unnecessary, ineffective and wasteful of resources.

Those who chose to become engineers generally have a strong desire to innovate, to design and construct useful devices and systems that are essential to maintaining and improving our physical existence. This impulse is strong enough to sustain a young student through the long rigors of engineering school where he learns, among other things, the fundamentals of his speciality, rational methods for defining and solving problems, effective ways for expanding and building on knowledge, and techniques of communication and cooperation. Engineering school, by its very nature, fosters the qualities of responsibility, self reliance and intellectual honesty.

In his first employment the former student quickly realizes that formal training only provides the basis and opportunity to learn a profession. To establish his professional worth and effectiveness within a competitive organization the young engineer must rely largely on his own initiative. While performing the duties of his first elementary assignments he finds that he must add to his knowledge and skills to sucessfully complete even these simple tasks. The acquisition of new knowledge and skills soon becomes so rewarding, as projects are successfully completed, that the practice becomes an essential habit. With each new project he determines the specific areas of his educational focus needed to strengthen his capabilities and proceeds accordingly. He could not wait for others to impart the needed information and would have no time for such futile methods because at school he had already learned efficient techniques for acquiring specific information.

The energy that sustains creative engineering derives from the successful process of defining a need, acquiring the relavent information and understanding, visualizing a solution and, finally, actualization of the solution as the result of individual initiative at each stage of the process. The acquistion of information and knowledge must be specific to immediate project needs and, for practical reasons, must be accomplished in an efficient and timely manner. Individual initiative is essential. The knowledge and skills acquired for a specific project become part of a continually growing professional qualification.

The engineer's competence to undertake specific projects is founded on his own accumulated structure of knowledge and skills and his ability to acquire specific information as needed. The professional engineer is accutely aware of the potential risks to himself, and possibly to others, of venturing into areas where he would be unqualified.

I therefore respectfully request that the Continuing Education mandate not be enacted for the following reasons:

1.  For any experienced engineer, at any particular time, his training needs are specific to himself in relations to his current responsibilities and projects. As a PE he will undertake properly to maintain the specific competencies necessary to meet any responsibility he assumes.

2.  A limited CE program session suitable for a group of experienced engineers would be very unlikely to meet specific needs of individuals in a way that would add to their professional competence.

3.  For an engineer, short training programs and seminars are very inefficient and inferior means of instruction when compared to individually directed use of internet resources, professional journals, trade periodicals, technical manuals, handbooks and textbooks.

4.  A mandated CE program is costly for the engineer in course fees, associated expenses and productive time lost.

5.  A CE program, to be of any measurable benefit, would have to have very extensive and specialized offerings and would be very costly to the State (and tax payers) to implement and maintain relevancy.

6.  The existing PE qualification process is very stringent and assures to a high degree that professional engineers already have the qualities that would make a mandated CE program redundant.

7.  Some productive senior engineers would be forced into complete retirement rather than accept another financial burden.

8.   The fact that some other states have mandatory CE programs is not a valid reason for Virginia to adopt a wasteful program that will benefit only the private program providers.

9.  Such programs are incremental steps toward ever-larger governments (and budgets) that return no provable benefit to the public.

10.  There is no demonstrated need for a mandated CE program.

Thank you for an opportunity to comment on this matter.

James K. Fishback, PE