Lessons learned from a year in the trenches: Teaching engineering ethics for P.E. licensure requirements

Abstract

On August 1, 2012, the state of Wisconsin instituted new continuing education requirements for professional engineers seeking re-licensure, and those requirements include two hours of engineering ethics education. The Department of Engineering Professional Development at the University of Wisconsin began developing ethics seminars and webinars to provide these credits to engineers in the state of Wisconsin. This paper explores several observations from talking with over 1000 practicing engineers in the past year. These include (1) that engineers typically do not use available professional codes of ethics when addressing ethical dilemmas; unsurprisingly, many instead employ what could be called common-sense ethics; (2) that organizational politics sometimes constrain discussion of case studies during these sessions; (3) that engineers in private and public sectors often carry differing views of the ethics of gift-giving; and (4) that experienced engineers, in particular, employ what could be called “gut-check” ethics that rely on intuition to determine right from wrong. We address the challenges these observations present and note opportunities for further analysis through study of the psychology of influence, motivated blindness, and cognitive biases. Regardless of the challenges we note here, it is clear that engineers place a high value on the opportunity to discuss case studies in ethics with other professional engineers, and when properly done, licensure training in ethics can provide a unique mentoring opportunity for the profession. Our existing PE seminar is a work in progress, and we hope this paper will initiate fruitful conversations about future directions as we develop an advanced seminar.