Ontario's PEAK Program

The Practice Evaluation and Knowledge Program (PEAK) program has been publicly praised as a fresh, new, and engaging way for continuing professional development and ethics. In my opinion, it is a way to show off the ongoing learning most engineers do anyway. If you take courses, attend conferences, or publish in academia, you have a chance to publicly display these achievements of continuous education. Gerard McDonald, P.Eng (Former PEO Registrar) provides his perspective on the PEAK program.

“If someone looks up your competitor on our system and it says he’s done all his CPD and your listing says you haven’t, which engineer do you think he wants to hire?” [1] - Gerard McDonald P.Eng

Initial Response of the PEO community

Most engineers, including the majority of PEO's senior leadership, support the program. Some believe that it should be mandatory [4], while others do not believe in the program or the goal it is trying to accomplish.

Kelly Reid, P.Eng was the former Vice President of the PEO and has been critical of the program since its inception.

"The practice of Engineering is too broad for any amount of education to reasonably capture[2]" "The root cause of the majority of engineering failures I am aware of is not lack of technical ability, but rather moral/ethical lapses by the practitioner." [2] - Kelly Reid P.Eng (Vice President, PEO 2018)

Kelly presents a valid point, engineers should ensure they are qualified and have the necessary up-to-date training? Most likely a one-hour ethics course is not the solution, rather more focus on external pressures on practitioners should be prioritized. Relevant up-to-date knowledge has been a legal obligation for all engineers in Ontario even before the implementation of the PEAK program. Currently, the CEAB (Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board) recognizes around 90 different types of engineering undergraduate disciplines, which is why the program is unable to provide a standardized course or format. Therefore, PEO leaves it up to the individual practitioner to develop a continuing knowledge plan that is valuable to them and their work.

On the program's initial release only 33% of license holders had participated. PEAK program coordinator, Arden Heerah, P.Eng, stated that "Most queries seem to be based on a fear of completing parts of the PEAK program incorrectly and then having to deal with licensing ramifications." and that the time commitment involved deterred engineers who worked full-time [3].

My Opinion on the PEAK Program

I believe that the PEAK program in its current form of voluntary participation is ideal. Publicly recognizing practitioners who invest to consistently grow their skills and contribute knowledge to the community is a great way to foster lifelong learning. However, making this a mandatory requirement for relicensing puts an added burden for licence holders with full-time jobs and other time commitments.

My Plan for Lifelong Learning

The initial degree is only the first step in the pursuit of engineering competency.[4]

The average half-life for a Software Engineer's technical skills is a mere 2.5 years [5]. This means that by the time I finish my undergraduate degree, the majority of skills, technologies, and frameworks I learned before my freshman year will require updating. As the industry advances at a rapid pace, this window of technical relevancy gets even smaller.

I am not worried about these statistics and see them as an opportunity for self-growth and constant improvement. My plan for continuous development is to leverage the learning skills I am gaining in my undergraduate degree and to constantly acquire and synthesize skills from other fields.

Learning How to Learn

Engineering undergrads throughout history have griped about the intense course load and the high level of understanding required for it. Taking maxed-out course loads, pulling all-nighters, and learning complicated concepts in short periods has molded me into an efficient learner. I truly believe that because of my experience as an engineering student, I can learn anything, develop skills, and solve problems at an accelerated rate.

Every day new languages, tools, and ways of working are created. Some fundamental concepts will never change, everything the modern software engineer uses are just abstractions built on top of foundational ideas (e.g. Data Structures, Algorithms, Distributed Systems, etc). In my opinion, acquiring this foundation is the real purpose of an engineering program and I believe when the industry changes as often as fashion, I will adapt and improve by consistently leveraging the fundamental concepts I learned.

There was a realization, after entering my third-year, that this would be the first time in my education that I would learn something new relating to computer science. Coming from a background of creating software since I was in middle school and hobbyist hardware skills, I was excited to learn new topics such as cryptography and digital logic design. Although these courses are challenging, I find myself using the knowledge I gained in other places to enhance my understanding of these fields. This brings me to the second part of my plan for lifelong learning, constant synthesis.

Complimentary Skills

At this point, I have not identified which field of software/computer engineering I want to pursue and consider myself to be an engineering generalist. I plan to follow my enthusiasm for everything technology by attending conferences, reading papers, and contributing to open source. Along with these experiences, I plan to continually invest time into learning skills that are not typically associated with Software Engineering.

Design: For the past two years, I have been self-teaching myself User Interface/Experience Design so that I can combine it with my frontend skills and deliver great digital experiences. Networking with designers, watching tutorials, and reading design reports from industry trendsetters are things that I have, and will continue to use to. I also recently picked up 3D modeling which I have been using to quickly prototype ideas I have and bring a new dimension to the webpages I create. The constantly increasing amount of tools and styles in the industry married to my ever-growing love for design will allow me to improve and learn about the discipline.

Writing and Law: A lot of designers consider writing to be another form of the discipline. In order to practice this skill, this summer I built myself a blog at http://reubenninan.tech/posts where I have been writing articles and displaying my work. This blog will act as a log of my progress, catalog of my work and a place for me to publish articles. Since the start of my degree, I have constantly pondered about what it means to be a professional software engineer. Over the course of my career, I intend to explore the full extent to which software, regulation, and professionalism meet and document this process on my blog.

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References

[1] McLeod, Mike. “Peak Performance.” Design Engineering, 20 Mar. 2017, www.design-engineering.com/features/peo-peak-1004026148/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2020.

[2] Reid, Kelly. PEAK – Kelly Reid P.Eng. www.kellyreidpeng.com/index.php/peak/.

[3] “PEAK Program Team Responding to First Wave of User Input.” Engineers Canada, 27 Nov. 2017, engineerscanada.ca/news-and-events/news/peak-program-team-responding-to-first-wave-of-user-input. ︎

[4] Bowman, C W. Lifelong Learning for Professional Engineers = Ingénieurs Et Formation Continue. Vol. 6, Canadian Academy of Engineering, 1997.

[5] Smerdon, Ernest T. Lifelong Learning for Engineers: Riding the Whirlwind. 1 Jan. 1996, www.nae.edu/19579/19582/21020/7356/7596/LifelongLearningforEngineersRidingtheWhirlwind.