As part of recommendation 12 in the FEA Path Forward Report, the Engineers Canada Board has initiated a pilot study of the Full Spectrum Competency Profile (FSCP). The FSCP defines all the competencies required of an engineer at the various points in their career development—from learner to graduate to licence holder. The FSCP was developed to serve as the framework for a National Academic Requirement for Licensure (NARL) and the transition to an outcomes-focused accreditation system. Building on competencies developed through education, the FSCP will require engineers to demonstrate competence prior to becoming licensed to practice.
The first phase of the pilot study will develop and define a subset of the FSCP competencies, indicators, and assessment processes and will test the assessment of those competencies. The purpose of the FSCP Pilot Study is to understand the effort required to define the FSCP competencies and explore the appropriate processes to assess them.
This process will be a collaborative effort between a program development consultant working in conjunction with an advisory group and Engineers Canada staff.
This phase has five parts:
- Identify an appropriate subset of competencies to pilot, touching on both the FSCP and NARL competencies.
- Define the subset competencies and their indicators in a way that they can be assessed in a defensible manner.
- Create assessment processes that can be implementable by both higher education institutions (HEIs) and regulators (at the “knows how” and “can do” levels of competence).
- Test the selected competencies and processes.
- Report the learnings and recommendations such that we can use these learnings in the definition and validation of the full FSCP/NARL frameworks.
By limiting the pilot to a subset of the competencies and observing the efforts required to develop them, the project team will be able to gather data and learnings to guide the development of the full FSCP and NARL frameworks, which we have been referring to as the Pilot Study, Phase 2.