08/10/04
To practice engineering for the public in the United States, you must be licensed as an engineer in each state in which you practice. In most states, the requirements for licensure are to:
pass the eight-hour Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Examination
complete a four-year engineering degree in a program approved by the state engineering licensure board
gain four years of qualifying engineering experience
pass the eight-hour Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Examination
The Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Examination covers material from your undergraduate engineering studies so the best approach is take and pass this examination during your senior year while the material for the exam is fresh in your mind. If you do, you will have completed the first two requirements for licensure upon earning your bachelor's degree in engineering. This approach keeps open your option to be licensed as an engineer with a minimum of extra effort.
The theory of licensing engineers is that by passing the required examinations and gaining some experience, someone demonstrates a certain minimum competence in engineering to the state and, thereby, gives some indication that they can do engineering without being likely to cause harm to the public. In electrical engineering, the common example given for the necessity of being licensed is the design of high voltage power transmission lines. If you are licensed and a power line that you design endangers the public, for example, it is, in theory, not because you were incompetent or did not know what you were doing. Some states have begun to license software engineers because of health and saftety hazzards that can result from faulty software, medical and air traffic control software, for example.
It is highly illegal to work directly for the public as an engineer without being licensed. In some states, it is illegal even to call yourself an engineer unless you are licensed. Nevertheless, many EE graduates in the past have not bothered to become licensed because people who have no license, regardless of their undergraduate major, have been able to practice electrical engineering in industry under industrial exclusion. Roughly, industrial exclusion means that the business that employs the unlicensed people who practice engineering assumes all legal liability for any errors in engineering practice that they commit.
A license obviously cannot guarantee that you will use good judgment in all situations, and hence does not remove the possibility of law suits. A license just helps eliminate the charge of incompetence. In recent years, many large companies have begun to encourage all of the people who work for them and do engineering work to become licensed, even if they can work legally under industrial exclusion. This change in attitude is, perhaps, due to their fear that, in law suits, unlicensed people who do engineering will be said to be incompetent or else they would have become licensed. Although that argument is not necessarily, or even typically, true, it is simpler to employ licensed people than to argue the point.
In any case, you, and all engineering graduates today, should prepare to become licensed even though, in the past, you might not have bothered. At at the very least, you should take the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Examination during your senior undergraduate year to keep your options open. Completing steps 3 and 4 listed above as necessary to become licensed can be completed later in your career if you decide you need to be licensed. Completing step 1 (the FE exam) later in your career when your knowledge of many of the fundamentals is rusty can be a killer.