APEGS is an organization with a focused and critically important mandate – to regulate professional engineering and geoscience in Saskatchewan for the protection of the public and the environment and for the benefit of society.
This legislated mandate is distinctive to APEGS and is not shared with any other organization. The APEGS vision is “a safe and prosperous future through engineering and geoscience”. This vision is very much shared with its members and with many provincial and national organizations, working from their unique mandates and all working collaboratively to achieve what none can do alone.
Professional engineers and geoscientists design solutions that make this province and this planet, a better place for all to live. This edition of The Professional Edge features stories about the kinds of work that take professional geoscientists and engineers outdoors and into the field. I invite you to read these stories in the context of the collaboratively held vision for a safe and prosperous future through engineering and geoscience.
Primary and secondary school teachers help young persons to believe they can be engineers and geoscientists. Universities recruit a diverse group of students into professional programs, offer them the best possible learning environment and prepare graduates for citizenship and satisfying careers. Engineers Canada, acting on behalf of the provincial and territorial engineering regulators, maintains the system for accreditation of engineering degree programs. Engineering and geoscience consulting firms and a network of employers of professional engineers and geoscientists create opportunities for satisfying careers and continuous workplace learning.
Industry consortiums, R&D organizations, universities and polytechnics, along with many other public and private institutions and individual businesses, engage in discovery and applied research and development, to generate knowledge and improve upon engineering and geoscience solutions. Geoscientists and engineers have personal scopes of practice, which may evolve over their careers. They use discoveries along with their training and experience to create new processes and products for employers and clients.
Engineers Canada and Geoscientists Canada advocate to the federal government, foster recognition of the value and contribution of the professions to society and promote diversity and inclusion in the professions. ACEC – SK works to create an understanding within governments, infrastructure owners and the public about the value that is created through professional engineering. The Engineering Institute of Canada exists to “develop and promote continuing education, initiate and facilitate interdisciplinary activities and services, lead member societies in defining and building the future of engineering and advocate the values and benefits of engineering.”
APEGS members accept personal responsibility to maintain their technical competencies through reflective professional practice, lifelong education and learning. They act always and only in ways that are consistent with the Code of Ethics, section 20 in the Regulatory Bylaws of APEGS. They are mentors. They affect attitudes toward and within the professions by how they act. They can be powerful advocates for their professions.
It is essential that APEGS, engineering and geoscience organizations and the businesses that employ engineers and geoscientists perform within their own distinctive mandates, recognize the mandates of others and collaborate to achieve a safe and prosperous future through engineering and geoscience. Because APEGS is the only organization that directly includes, as its members, all those engineers and geoscientists who practise their professions in Saskatchewan, APEGS is going to be called upon in many ways and by many constituencies to collaborate and sometimes to lead in initiatives and programs intended to achieve our collective vision. Nothing that APEGS does can get in the way of its principal mandate for regulation of the professions. To do otherwise could threaten the confidence that the public and government have in APEGS for self-regulation of the professions. That is why collaboration with other engineering and geoscience organizations is so important to achieve the APEGS vision.