What is a Professional Engineer (PE) license? I had been a practicing engineer for 8 years before I learned about it. One day, working in the lab, a team lead joking told me that he was the only “real engineer” on our team. When he saw the confused look on my face, he explained that he was a licensed PE and showed me his credential. I laughed. How was I not a professional engineer? After all, I came to work every day, practiced engineering, and received a pay check every other week for almost a decade. Isn’t a professional a person that regularly performs a service in return for compensation? That is the definition in any other profession.
The term Professional Engineer (PE) is reserved legally. It can only be used by those that acquire a license through testing with the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) and earn years of verifiable work experience as an Engineering Intern (EI) supervised by another licensed PE. The odd thing, to me anyway, is that they chose “Professional Engineer”, when the vast majority of paid engineers will never require the license. This is the license required to sign and seal construction plans for permitting. Think roads, bridges, buildings, and stadiums. Shouldn’t they have chosen something like “Construction Engineer”? They didn’t.
Florida statute §471.003 Qualifications for practice
(1) No person other than a duly licensed engineer shall practice engineering or use the name or title of “licensed engineer,” “professional engineer,” or any other title, designation, words, letters, abbreviations, or device tending to indicate that such person holds an active license as an engineer in this state.
Notice that “professional engineer” is lower-case. This term is similarly protected in every state in the US.
I was forced to accept that I was a paid engineer, but not a professional engineer. I had worked at NASA and Sandia National Laboratories, but was not a professional engineer. In fact, the number of licensed PE’s is estimated to account for only 5% of all paid engineers in the US.
Software engineers make up roughly 80% of all paid engineers alone. Most, almost all, aren’t professional engineers. This includes NASA, all national laboratories, Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, Facebook, and X. In 2022, there were an estimated 4.4 million software engineers in North America. There are 152 million people employed in the US workforce, making software engineers 2.54% of the total workforce. [link] By comparison, there were 931,640 licensed PEs in the United States as of 2022. [link] I’m sure these numbers are worse now with the recent explosion of artificial intelligence (AI). That still doesn’t include any of the other engineers (electrical, mechanical, chemical, biomedical) that don’t work in construction.
In the years that followed, we became active in real estate. During several remodeling projects, I had to hire a few PEs. Then I really understood why the license is required. The first time, we put a big addition on a house. The architect and general contractor were not allowed to build the addition without the seal of the PE. What if the structure later fell over? What if people were hurt or died in that process? Why the engineers require a license became clear. People could get hurt or killed if they do a bad job. Think about big buildings or bridges.
The license, and legal recourse, makes sense for construction engineering. I still thought it’s odd that “Professional Engineer” was the chosen title. Then I read that licensing of PEs in the US began in 1907 [link] and it made sense finally. There were no computers yet. Computer engineering didn’t start until decades later. The same reasoning applies to electricity, radio, and cars. At the time that they chose the term, they were the only group claiming to be engineers.