BEM works with varsities to increase Malaysia's registered engineers
KOTA KINABALU: With the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Board of Engineers Malaysia (BEM) and Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), it is expected in due course to increase Malaysia's registered engineers ratio from 1:300 to 1:100.
BEM president Datuk Seri Dr Roslan Md Taha said the board's records had already clearly marked an increase in registered engineers over the last 10 years.
For graduate engineers, he said, the annual number registering with the board has increased from 2,810 in 2006 to 6,663 as of October 2017.
He added that, for professional engineers, the annual number registering with the board has increased from only 217 in 2006 to 547 by October 2017.
“To get a more realistic ratio and to increase the registration of accredited engineering graduates, registration in bulk with university cooperation has been introduced.
“Through this bulk registration, the process of registering graduate engineers will be easier and faster through the BEM online system accessible on the university administration side,” said Roslan at the BEM Roadshow 2017 and MoU signing with UMS here yesterday.
“To facilitate the procedure relating to documentation, the university only needs to send the senate's approved list of the graduating engineers together with official full transcripts.
“The normal requirements of ‘certified true copy' by professional engineer and the presentation of original degree scroll are also exempted,” he explained.
Roslan said the requirement relaxation by BEM symbolizes its trust of the selected universities in forwarding genuine documentations of their graduates for BEM-accredited programs.
“With this bulk registration, the ratio of the number of registered engineers to the population is expected to increase from 1:300 to 1:100 in due course,” he said.
“With these statistics, the engineers of Malaysia are well poised to take on the challenges of handling major engineering projects in the country and beyond.
“All the more compelling, with the onslaught of liberalization, I believe our engineering practitioners are ready to compete with our foreign counterparts, in particular those from the Asean region, in the light of the advent of the Asean Economic Community (AEC), which took effect December 2016,” added Roslan.