Will Software Engineers Be Licensed in the Future?

Software engineers may be able to obtain a professional engineering license in the future to practice, IEEE-USA Licensure and Registration Committee members revealed at one of this year’s Annual Meeting Cracker-Barrel sessions.

According to Mitch Thornton, chair of the IEEE-USA Licensure and Registration Committee, a Software Engineering Licensure Consortium was developed in 2007 with the purpose of developing a statement and strategy for achieving a software engineering licensure path. The Consortium includes representatives from IEEE, the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES), the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), and the Texas Board of Professional Engineers.

In order to create a path for software engineering licensure, 10 states must request the need for software engineering license and a lead technical society must be identified, said Thornton. Have 10 states requested this path to licensure? Almost – nine states have supported development of a software engineering professional engineering exam. Who will be the lead technical society? That still remains to be determined, but it could be IEEE-USA. The IEEE Computer Society sent out a survey to 3500 of its members and found that 60 percent of the respondents thought there should be a path to licensure for software engineers.

If the Consortium meets the NCEES mandates described above, software engineers would need to meet the same requirements as current power, computer, and electrical and electronics engineers. This includes a degree from an accredited engineering education program, completion of the eight-hour Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam, four years of qualifying engineering experience, and completion of an eight-hour Principles & Practices of Engineering (PE) exam.

One question on many audience members’ minds was what is the difference between licensure and certification? “The purpose of licensure is to protect public safety and the purpose of certification is to demonstrate knowledge or skill in an area,” explained Thornton. More specifically, certification demonstrates mastery of a specific body of knowledge and licensure is legal permission from a state to engage in practice. Even though there are several vendor-specific certifications available and two IEEE Computer Society certifications, there is no specific path to licensure.

States license engineers “to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public,” said Dick Schwarz, past chair of the IEEE-USA Licensure and Registration Committee. “And there are lots of examples of how software can affect the public, which is why many people are interested in licensing software engineers.”