When high school students are looking at applying to engineering in Canada they might run across something stating that the institution’s program is “accredited”. In fact, online there is a whole list of Accredited Engineering Programs in Canada that you can consult if the institution website is not clear about this. All engineering programs at Waterloo are accredited. But what does this mean, and why does it matter?

“Accredited” simply means that the program has been reviewed on a regular basis by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB, part of Engineers Canada) and that it meets or exceeds certain minimum educational standards. A future post will go into more depth on these standards, since they’re a bit complicated. Suffice to say for now that the standards include what is taught, how it’s taught, who does the teaching, how good the facilities are, and various other aspects.

Why does it matter? Well, in Canada if you want to practise “engineering”, fulfill certain roles that have regulatory requirements, and refer to yourself professionally and in public as an “engineer”, you need to hold a license from the provincial body that regulates engineering (PEO in Ontario, for example). I hold a license in Ontario to practise chemical engineering and can use the title “P.Eng.” (professional engineer) in official business. In Ontario, you can look up to see if someone holds a valid engineering license using the PEO Directory.

To get the engineering license, you need to demonstrate that you have the required educational background (among other things). If you graduated from an accredited undergraduate engineering program, it is automatically a given that you have the background and that hurdle is cleared. If you didn’t graduate from an accredited program (for example, an engineering program from a foreign country), you’ll have to go through a long documentation process and possibly write a variety of technical exams to prove your background competency. These exam cost money to write and are not easy, so graduating from an accredited program saves a lot of time, money and effort.

The accreditation and licensing landscape is somewhat similar in the U.S., where ABET (Accredidation Board for Engineering and Technology) examines programs and each state has their own specific professional engineering (P.E.) requirements. There are also various differences, and a license in one state or province is not necessarily transferable to another state or province, so it’s a bit complicated and I’m no expert on that. The bottom line however is that graduating from an accredited program makes life much easier if you intend to be a legally-recognized engineer somewhere.