PROGRESS AND RENEWAL
Proper Title Use Builds the Value of Your Licence
APEGA’s mandate and expertise lie in regulation. We focus on protecting the public by regulating the practices of Professional Engineering and Geoscience within Alberta. This regulatory effort includes ensuring that only those who are competent to practise are issued a licence, and that companies offering engineering or geoscience services are issued a permit. Much of the value APEGA delivers to Members and the public is through these licences and permits. They allow the public to easily identify individuals and companies who are competent. Members of the public can then engage properly licensed and permitted companies for the work they need done. This is all about trust in the APEGA professions — our reputation as a regulator, and your reputation as a Member. For our licences and permits to have meaning, there have to be consequences for those who practise without them or imply that they have them when they aren’t qualified to practice. That’s at the core of APEGA’s compliance efforts — to investigate these cases and make sure that individuals and companies that don’t comply either change their ways or face the consequences. It’s also part of your obligation as a Member. You need to educate yourself about what titles and company names can and cannot be used and by whom. In this, the Progress and Renewal edition of The PEG , we encourage you to renew your understanding of the scope-of-practice and right-to-title provisions in the Engineering and Geoscience Professions Act (EGP Act) . You can find the Act online at apega.ca. Section 1, Scope of Practice, gives us our compliance authority. Many compliance cases deal with misrepresentation or misuse of reserved titles. The purpose of a job title is to give an average person an indication of what type of work you do and are capable of. For example, the title Operations Engineer implies that the employee using it does engineering in the operations area of a company. The average person would expect that this person is qualified to do this work. If the person holding this title is not licensed, however, using it is a violation the Act. Violations like this are referred to APEGA’s Compliance Department. Staff members discover them in their searches of publications and listings, or going about their usual duties. The next step is working with the person, company or both to make them compliant. If the contravention isn’t removed, we take legal action. Job titles and job descriptions are typically the responsibility of a company’s human resources department, in cooperation with
management. The title is often not the choice of an individual. Members should take responsibility for their own titles, and also let their companies know the rules. You shouldn’t misrepresent your competency, and you should try to get HR practices that aren’t compliant changed. Let’s say you are on the way to obtaining a licence and have qualified for APEGA Member-in-Training (M.I.T.) status. You do not yet have the right to practise independently — and your title must reflect this. Although APEGA M.I.T.s have special leave to use titles like Operations Engineer, the title must be qualified. Following are two examples of title words that are not in con- travention and therefore do comply. Jane Smith, E.I.T. Operations Engineer Jane Smith Operations Engineer-in-Training If you are an undergraduate university student, you are not licensed with APEGA as a Member-in-Training or as a Professional Member. That means you are not yet fully competent to practise independently, and you do not have the right to use a title like Operations Engineer. You have yet to prove your ability and demonstrate your understanding of the ethics associated with professional practice. A suitable job title for your co-op work term would be Operations Co-op Student, clearly indicating to an average person that you are a student and in no way implying that you are a Professional Member. Our approach to compliance is one of education. We want you to fully understand your regulatory obligations and ours. If you have questions about reserved titles and how they affect your ability to practise, please contact the APEGA Compliance De- partment. If you would like us to work directly with your company, particularly the departments that influence job titles, we are avail- able. We would rather see fewer compliance cases than more, and we prefer not to take legal action if we can easily resolve issues through cooperation. If you need to find out if someone is licensed or a company has a permit, use APEGA’s searchable directories on our website, apega.ca. These directories contain the names of licensed Members and permit-holding companies in good standing.
Questions or concerns? Contact the APEGA Compliance Department at 780-426-3990 or compliance@apega.ca.
52 | PEG SUMMER 2015
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