The Demise of The Registered Professional Engineer

The Registered Professional Engineer is a storied institution that arose from the ashes of the 19th Century Industrial Revolution in response to spectacular early failures in bridges, boilers, and bureaucrats. For the last 100 years, the Engineering Licensure Model has remained largely unchanged. Today in the US, engineers are regulated by State Boards — many are holding on by a thread of legislative whimsy against budget cuts and diminishing relevance. Registered Professional Engineers are quickly becoming the next victim of the New World that they themselves enabled.

At the most elemental level, Engineers remove risk from physical systems. This is obviously important for human safety, but “risk” is also a driving force in finance, insurance, and entrepreneurship — all of which are required to engage in modern enterprise. As such, Professional Engineers have enormous opportunity to advance the course of civilization if they could figure out how to measure their true value accordingly.

Why does the PE exist?

The Professional Engineer (PE) process is meant to establish the minimum verifiable state of competence for an Engineer. This was necessary in order to secure the “single point of failure” inherent to the 19th century hierarchies. In modern times, however, the problem that the PE process solves may now be accomplished in other ways.

For example, many failures in engineered systems are not necessarily caused by some twisted nuance in the Natural Laws, rather, the majority of accidents result from simple mistakes like forgetting to divide by pi or failing to carry a decimal point, or poorly navigating an ethical quandary. A Professional Engineering license places the PE under the incentive of a revokable credential in exchange for a relative professional monopoly. This may secure the “single point of failure” condition — but it also perpetuates an expensive and fault prone organization structure.

The Networked Organization

In modern times we learned that the same problem can be solved by having two or more engineers check each other’s work. Herein lies the difference between a hierarchy and a network organizations. Network organizations are characterized by the quantity and quality of the connections that bind…

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