On Wednesday, February 22, the Engineers Canada Board and representatives from the engineering regulators participated in a workshop to identify potential priorities for Engineer Canada’s 2025-2029 strategic plan.
The session opened with an introduction from Nancy Hill, President-Elect of Engineers Canada and Chair of the Strategic Planning Task Force. Hill provided an overview of the overall strategic planning process and reiterated that the day’s session was about seeking a general understanding of potential areas of focus.
This was followed by an overview of the priorities of the current strategic plan, setting a context to consider what, if any, current work should be considered to move forward into the next plan.
To round out this picture, key trends identified in the environmental scan for the strategic plan were reviewed. This includes factors spanning a number of areas, including engineering education, licensure, representation of equity-deserving groups in engineering, public perceptions of the profession, market forces affecting engineering, mobility of engineers and engineering services, changes in the regulatory landscape, and climate change.
With this context, participants worked in groups to propose up to five strategic priorities for the next plan. This typically included a mix of new priorities and the continuation of existing ones. There were several common threads across the groups, including:
- Implement the recommendations from the current priority to investigate and validate the scope of accreditation.
- Continue work in addressing emerging disciplines and areas of engineering practice.
- Continue work to make engineering a more equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible profession.
- Provide greater support in improving governance and regulatory systems.
- Advance the role of engineers in addressing climate change.
- Advocate and promote importance of the profession and licensure to key stakeholders and the public.
- Continue to advance harmonization and collaboration between regulators.
Participants were then asked to identify the areas they believe most important for Engineers Canada to pursue. The next step is for the Strategic Planning Task Force and Engineers Canada staff to synthesize these broad areas of interest into a coherent set of proposed priorities that form the basis of a draft strategic plan.
The Board will consider these priorities in more detail at their June strategic planning workshop. The output of that workshop will be a draft strategic plan that will be consulted upon over the fall 2023 and early winter of 2024, then ultimately brought to the Annual Meeting of Members for approval in May 2024.
