Project aims to bring consistency to assessing credentials of international engineers

The Canadian Council of Professional Engineers in Ottawa (CCPE) is moving on in its efforts to smooth the integration into the workforce of engineers who come to work in Canada from other countries.
The CCPE project known as “FC21” is moving into its final and third stage, which will involve actually implementing 17 approved recommendations from Phase II.
Under this new phase CCPE will be creating a unified database to help the different provincial engineering licensing associations to assess the academic credentials of immigrating engineers.
The International Institution Degree Database, as the new listing will be called, will help to ensure that there is more consistency in how different provincial licensing organizations assess and recognize engineering applicants’ academic credentials.
The CCPE currently has a list with basic information on approximately 3,500 institutions representing more than 140 countries. Many of the provincial organizations have also developed their own database of foreign engineering institutions and programs. The task now is to combine and expand on these bodies of information.
Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRDC) has given CCPE funding for the first part of the study which is probably the most politically sensitive part — developing the criteria for how the database will be used.