Registrar & CEO's Message
APEGA
How Will You Serve Your Professions in 2018? BY JAY NAGENDRAN, P.ENG., QEP, BCEE, FEC APEGA Registrar & Chief Executive Officer
APEGA Council and staff are busy preparing for another year of serving the public — and serving you, too. At first glance, those two aspects of APEGA’s role may seem contradictory. Can APEGA effectively act on behalf of both sets of stakeholders? The answer is yes, but let me qualify that statement. We do not act on behalf of specific individuals in the way a union does. Rather, our Member services are about providing you with the tools and information to practise ethically, professionally, and successfully. That distinction is critical in enabling us to regulate objectively and effectively, through things like enforcement, discipline, registration, and our various reviews, investigations, and audits. Our mission statement puts APEGA’s role bluntly: “Regulate the practices of engineering and geoscience to serve the public interest in Alberta.” That’s a straightforward command — it tells us what we must do — and Members are not even mentioned. The nuance of what we are and how we regulate is found within our vision statement: “APEGA will earn the confidence of the public and instill pride in its Members.” Those words hint at the complementary nature of the services we offer you. Regulation does not operate in a vacuum. Certainly, regulation is about the organization known as APEGA, but it’s also about you and your professional responsibilities and obligations. We don’t earn the confidence of the public by simply regulating well. We earn the confidence of the public by regulating well and having engaged, ethical, properly educated and trained, and supportive Members. That is the essence of self- regulation. The more of you there is in that equation, the better we are.
We offer you tools and programs to make the partnership work, from professional development events through to our mentoring program. We offer services to help you advance your career and succeed in a challenging economy. We offer benefits that enable you to leverage your buying power, insure against personal and professional risk at an affordable rate, plan your investments, and even travel less expensively. We provide volunteer avenues that allow you to play a role in making regulatory decisions, share your knowledge with future generations of Professional Engineers and Professional Geoscientists, and organize events in your own communities. I’d also like to emphasize that internally, many of our functions support our overarching regulatory roles. There’s an APEGA contingent whose work you rarely see, mostly in the areas of finance, information tech- nology, and quality and performance management. No regulatory body of APEGA’s size and scope can do its job without these parts of its operational foundation. Many of you will want to tell me about all the disengaged and even disgruntled Members you know. I realize they are out there. There’s also a large contingent of what I’d call minimally engaged Members. They pay their dues, they complete the requirements of our mandatory Continuing Professional Development program, and they practise ethically and competently. But for whatever reason, that’s the extent of it. I look at engagement as a continuum. It starts on the low end, with Members who grudgingly comply with our regulations and standards — or don’t even fully comply, requiring APEGA to exercise its regulatory obligations — and literally roll their eyes at any email request or new initiative from their Association. The continuum extends to fully engaged Members, who
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