Engineering registration
 

As part of registration with APEGA I must complete a Work Experience Record.
This has a page per company worked for with two boxes to list experience.
One box is labelled Professional Level Experience and the other is Technologist Level Experience.
In my earlier years as an engineer I would have had technologist level experience (the APEGA description of this experience is being heavily supervised and following procedures). Now I am in senior roles, working freely and often have people working for me. I regard my experience at this stage in my career as Professional Level Experience (described by APEGA as working freely, self initiated technical guidance, broad duties). I don't feel my recent assignments have had any technologist level experience. However I don't know if it is acceptable for the technologist level experience box to remain empty.

Have any engineers filled in a similar form? Did you ever leave technologist blank?

Any opinion/discussion on the matter would be welcome from none engineers who may have an opinion on the 'Canadian' way of doing things.

Cheers

Re: Engineering registration
 

Didn't come across this with PEO or APEGBC.

If you're going for PEng and have sufficient experience I'd be tempted to leave the technologist box blank. The Canadian system leans towards the engineering elite/ technologist grunt class divide and they don't seem to like the more egalitarian UK system where you can move through the ranks (as I did too).

Hopefully there's an APEGA person around who could give more first-hand info.

There's also an engineering part in the wiki which links to an article on the IMechE website which I found extremely enlightening.

Re: Engineering registration
 

Thanks for the response. I was aware of the difficulties of registration which is why I have started to get the ball rolling early, my girlfriend is going through a similar thing for nursing. I am actually CEng but for all I read about 'mutual agreements' there are more sources which basically say it is none existent in Canada for UK trained engineers. Which is a shame as it was far from easy to obtain CEng!

This is the IMechE article for anyone interested.

The Engineering Profession in Canada

Re: Engineering registration
 

I am shortly to hear from APEGA.


I left all the technologist boxes blank. I reckon they will discount your experience if they don't consider it worthy.


You are allowed to split jobs into two or even sheets if you feel the need to get more words down. you would then need a reference for each page. I did this.


Note, the most serious delays for me were with my british references, both of whom told be they had done the reference, when in reality they had took one look at the online form, decided it was stupid and they didn't like it and then sent apega an email reference instead. In the meantime APEGA were just stating they hadn't got anything and my UK references were swearing blind they had done it. It took ages to work out what had actually happened!

Re: Engineering registration
 

Ah good to know someone is going through the process. Please let me know how you get on please. I assume you're already in Canada?

Is the online reference form laborious then? Does it take a lot of effort? I'm a self employed contractor and so if it is laborious my referees may not bother! :s

I believe you get 750 words in the first box. Have you described in detail specifically what you have done? I've had a couple of short 6month long contracts and some longer ones. I think for the short contracts I won't fill the box but for the longer ones I may need to go over but then that means more references :/

Are you chartered? Did you get any credit for it if you are?

Re: Engineering registration
 

The online reference form is very straightforward. One of my UK referees said it was the simplest reference form he had ever seen.

I kept the work experience descriptions very brief. It may be different for someone with only 5 or 6 years of experience but with 20 years or so I would say the old stuff is not that important as the minimum requirement is 4 years experience total including 1 year Canadian. I didn't put any of the experience down as technologist.

There is no credit at all for C.Eng. Getting C.Eng took far more effort than P.Eng.

Re: Engineering registration
 

put any post graduate experience as professional level experience.
only use the tech box for pre grad work.

most associations will credit up to 1 year pre grad work but as you are a ceng i assume you are not short of experience.

Re: Engineering registration
 

online reference is very very simple and quick; they just decided that the questions weren't that relevant and they could add more by an email reference

Re: Engineering registration
 

Thank you for the clarification and information everyone, I really appreciate it.
I have 10 years experience and my masters was done part time whilst working and was based on my work so I can't really claim that as additional experience so it'll just be my working experience.

CEng was a lot of effort so it's a shame it'll count for nothing now.