The 23th of April the International seminar took place in NTUU “KPI” “European engineer certification: engineer passport and assurance of the educational quality”.
Their organizers were Ministry of education and science of Ukraine, Association of scientific and engineering communities in Ukraine, National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute” and Association of the rectors of Ukrainian higher educational technical universities, there took part representatives of the European engineer and educational associations, governmental authorities of Ukraine, business and industry, presidents of national higher educational universities and also professors and students of NTUU “KPI”.
This seminar became an important step on the way to European integration of technical education. But not only education, as a specific feature of working as an engineer is that the level of a specialist is denoted not only by his academic degree, but by ability to create new and also by professional experience. European engineer associations have the same opinion about certification of their specialists.
The legislator is the Federation of the European engineer associations (FEANI), that connects about 350 engineer and educational associations, 32 European countries and almost 4 millions of qualified engineers. In October 2014 Ukraine has also joined it.
Today FEANI makes 3 directions of engineer specialization accreditation and certification of professional engineers:
– FEANI INDEX, i.e. a list of engineer programmes (specialities), which meet the standards of education; accredited or officially acknowledged on a national level; meet the standards of European level and acknowledged in EU.
-Engineering Card ( “Passport” or “Card” of an engineer), every owner of which is included in the European register FEANI, which based in Brussels.
-EUR ING (“European engineer”) – honored title, the candidates for which should have relevant engineer education, years of experience in engineering researches, analyzing and designing and also follow the professional ethics.
For studying two of them were devoted special sessions of the international seminar: “European card of an engineer” and “European accreditation system of engineer specialities”.
During the first session with the detailed information about initiatives of FEANI concerning European engineer certification addressed secretary general of this federation Dyrk Bochare. Volodymyr Parkhomenko, a head of the National monitoring committee, reported about organization of this work and steps which are necessary to make to join FEANI. And Eduard Kuznetsov, the chief executive officer adviser of National cosmic agency, was the one who made an addition to this information by his emotional speech. He accentuated on urgent necessity to elevate the prestige of an engineer’s work and, from the point of view of Ukrainian scientific and technical achievements, in particular in the cosmic sphere, joining of national engineers to European community and their obtainment of certificates are vital not only for Ukraine, but for Europe as well.
The second session was started by president declaration of European accreditation network of European education quality (ENAEE)- Bernard Remau. That was the accurate and concrete information about procedures and requirements, which are necessary to follow for obtaining the European accreditation of engineer programmes, (or, considering the national regulatory structure, specialities). Bernard Remau reported that there are already 13 countries that have joined the convention of mutual acknowledgement of certificates of European education quality.
The extremely important summary of the seminar was assignation the Memorandum of pilot implementation of European initiatives between relevant European and Ukrainian organizations. The subscriptions on this document were made by the head of Association of the rectors of technical universities in Ukraine, rector of NTUU “KPI” Zgurovsky Mihaylo and the president of Community of science and engineering association of Ukraine, Mykola Kyriuhin from Ukrainian side and secretary general of Federation of European engineer associations (FEANI) Dyrk and the president of European network of European education quality (ENAEE) Bernard Remau – from the side of European organizations. Under the text of Memorandum there is also a name of a deputy minister of science and education of Ukraine – Maksym Striha, who couldn’t take part in seminar because of the urgent detached duty, and signed it the day before.
So the next step must be Ukrainian joining to European convention about mutual acknowledgement of engineer education certificates. According to Mykola Kyriuhin’s words, if there are no emergencies in Ukraine, it will be able to happen till the end of this year.