Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING CAPACITY: EDUCATION, TRAINING AND MOBILITY■Broaden the focus to include middle and later career assistanceand recognition.Credit Transfer System (ECTS), as well as the promotion of theEuropean Dimension in Higher Education.■trainingandEncourage a whole-of-career approach to education,recognition.■Accommodate all accords and forums into a truly internationalalliance with a single post-nominal for each categoryof practitioner.7.5.3 The Eur Ing and BolognaAccordWilli Fuchs and Iring WasserAcademic and professional mobility of engineers in Europe,and indeed worldwide, is becoming an ever-growing concernfor the engineering community, as well as for policy-makers.It is an undisputed fact that future prosperity of societies andeconomies relies in no small part on the unrestricted mobilityof its most productive workforce – the engineers of thetwenty-first century.The engineering community in Europe has reacted and recentlyrenewed its commitment to foster academic and professionalmobility on the continental scale. Among the most importantinitiatives is the European Accredited Engineering Project(EUR-ACE). As a result of this project, a single European systemfor accreditation of engineering education has been established.In 2005, the project partners have unanimously agreedon the EUR-ACE ‘Framework Standards for the Accreditationof Engineering Programmes’. Furthermore, a consensus withregard to the future organization and management of the EUR-ACE accreditation system has been reached. In 2006, the EuropeanNetwork for the Accreditation of Engineering Education(ENAEE) was founded. One of its most important partners isthe European Federation of National Engineering Associations(FEANI), which has agreed in principle to accept the results ofa EUR-ACE accreditation as an academic prerequisite for theinclusion of engineering graduates in its register of EuropeanProfessional Engineers (EUR-ING).European accreditation for academic and professionalpurposesAccreditation of engineering education in Europe servesimportant purposes for society. In the framework of the BolognaProcess, it is an essential prerequisite for the completion ofthe European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by the year 2010.The EHEA strives for a European knowledge society characterizedby high mobility and by high-quality lifelong learningopportunities. This is to be accomplished by the promotion ofeasily comparable degrees, cyclical and permeable study structures,a European ‘Diploma Supplement’ and the EuropeanWithin the narrower realm of the common European market,which depends on principles such as freedom of movement ofworkers, rights of establishment and freedom of services forits prosperity, another focus comes into play. Only recently,a new European Directive on the recognition of professionalqualifications 86 was passed in order to establish a clear, secureand fast system for the recognition of qualifications in the fieldof the regulated professions and to ensure free movement. TheEuropean Union institutions and Member States were calledupon to facilitate employment and the provision of servicesthrough wholesale consolidation of the existing regimes ofprofessional recognition. In the sensitive area of engineeringmobility and employment, there is a great need for validatedprocedures to recognise engineering degrees and professionalqualifications of engineering graduates. Transnational cooperationin the field of quality assurance and accreditation hasbeen one of the most promising avenues to achieve this goaland to fulfilling the promises of the Lisbon Convention, whichaspires to make Europe the most advanced knowledge societyin the world.Impediments for transnational recognition ofengineering degrees in EuropeAcademic and professional mobility of engineering studentsand graduates in Europe are facing manifold challenges. Therecontinues to be a considerable diversity of both engineeringdegrees in terms of duration, content and institutional backgroundand consequently public knowledge about their qualityis at times insufficient especially across national borders.This degree and institutional diversity is matched by a greatvariety of national quality assurance and accreditation systems.There are a number of initiatives under way on the Europeanscale to foster transnational recognition of accreditationresults (such as the planned institutionalization of a Europeanregister of quality assurance agencies that follow a code ofgood practice and the European standards and guidelines),but thus far transnational recognition needs to be bolstered.Precautions against fraudulent obtainment of degrees havebeen taken. Add to this the virulent problem of a growing nonofficialhigher education sector and the phenomenon of transnationaleducation with a lack of regulatory codes, and thedimension of the challenge becomes obvious.Furthermore, in some European countries the academic degreeconstitutes the automatic admission ticket to the nationaljob market whereas in others additional prerequisites such asproof of a certain period of recognized training programmesor validated professional engineering experience are required.86 Directive 2005/36/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the recognitionof professional qualifications, 2005-09-07.363