Academic qualification and experience are equally important in engineering

Recent reports that the Engineers’ Board of Kenya (EBK) has refused to recognise several degree programmes in the public universities is worrying.

This is particularly painful for students who have been pursuing courses into which they were admitted by chartered and authentic universities.

The board’s claim that public universities do not have the resources and competence to run some programmes may be true in some cases.

However, it is important to note that some of the discredited courses have been offered for several years now and graduates are performing well in their careers even without the additional training that the board is now insisting on.

Engineering is a challenging and practical discipline that requires numeracy, common sense, imagination, and above-average reasoning in order to produce good results.

However, many studies have shown that engineers become good professionals through practice, which can be done under competent engineering faculty or practising engineers.

The EBK’s complaint thus brings to the fore the question of who is qualified to be called a registered professional engineer.

Another important question is: Is it possible to be a good professor and a consulting engineer at the same time?

The EBK has in the past defined what constitutes a registrable engineering graduate in terms of the content to be followed in undergraduate training.

To be a professional engineer, a student must undergo training in an accredited university and then do pupilage under a competent practising engineer registered in Kenya for at least three years.

The intriguing thing is that the EBK rarely considers the training received during post-graduate studies under an engineering professor in or outside Kenya when determining relevant experience.

This is important because universities are keen to retain their best students for post-graduate training, which usually takes place in the industrialised countries.

Many academicians who teach engineering subjects undertook their post-graduate studies in the industrialised countries.

The students typically take between two to four years to obtain a master’s degree and three to five years for a doctorate.

To claim that such highly qualified engineers are not fit to be registered by the EBK is illogical and unfair.

For one to get a PhD, one typically has to take eight to 10 years after an undergraduate degree to master his area of specialisation.

Is it fair to deny such individuals registration?

The time spent pursuing a doctorate is enough for a graduate to acquire the practical skills needed to become a registered professional engineer.

To expect such highly trained people to work under their former classmates or juniors in Kenya as assistant engineers simply does not make sense.

Without post-graduate studies and scholarly publications, few inventions and innovations would be realised and career progression in public institutions would be difficult. In short, there would be anarchy and chaos.

The board must consider offering automatic membership at the registered professional engineer level to the lecturers and professors who hold master’s and doctorate degrees in engineering, in the spirit of fairness and rationality.

Sending graduates back to class to get additional training from “incompetent lecturers and professors” will not solve the problem.

It will simply lead to the death of engineering programmes that university senates have painstakingly put together.

If practising engineers want to become lecturers and professors, they should first go back to school.

The practising engineer in Kenya is largely a businessman motivated by profit, while the engineering professor is a scholar guided by altruism.

Let us not sacrifice the tried and tested path of socio-economic advancement at the altar of private profiteering.

We need one centre of power to be the arbiter in matters of university syllabuses.

The EBK members should be incorporated into the technical committees of the Commission for University Education in order to bring sanity to the training of engineers in Kenya.

Ideally, the commission should have the last word on who should train engineers.

The writer teaches agricultural engineering at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology ([email protected])