There's a contradiction at the center of continuing education for professional engineers, and most PEs recognize it the moment it's named: reading the latest International Building Code (IBC) cover to cover for an active project earns you nothing. Sitting through a flooring manufacturer's lunch presentation earns you a PDH.
That's not a bug in the system. It's how the system was designed.
Continuing education (CE) requirements for professional engineers were built around a simple premise: licensed professionals should demonstrate ongoing learning as a condition of renewal. The intent was legitimate. The execution created something different.
The current model rewards seat time and approved providers, not outcomes. To earn credit, an engineer needs a credentialed course from an accredited provider with documented attendance. What that course actually teaches — and whether it advances anyone's professional practice — is largely beside the point. State boards don't measure learning. They measure hours.
Vendors recognized this early. Sponsoring a lunch-and-learn is low-cost, reaches a captive audience, and produces a creditable professional development hour (PDH) with minimal administrative friction. The result is a CE ecosystem where a significant share of available content isn't designed to advance the profession. It's designed to move product.
Dean Dalvit, Founding Principal of EV Studio, a 100-person AE firm licensed in 27 states, put it plainly: "I've not seen an engineer or architect present any of these lunch-and-learns. It's always a business development person."
When California's Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists surveyed its licensees in 2024 about potentially adding mandatory CE requirements, 64% of respondents opposed them. Many of the written comments said the same thing in different ways. One licensed civil and structural engineer wrote: "I have found that fulfilling this requirement has been a waste of time. Many continuing courses are expensive and a waste of time. There are no standards or quality control."
Nevada's board heard similar feedback in its own licensee survey when they asked the question: does the current CE system accomplish the actual desired outcomes? One respondent described the tension directly: "The best continuing education I get is from new projects. Each offers its own obstacles and challenges which require you to learn, research, and collaborate to overcome." That same engineer noted that the CE classes available to them were expensive and low-yield by comparison.
This isn't a fringe view. It's what engineers say when their own licensing boards ask them directly. The engineers most serious about their professional development — the ones reading code updates, self-studying emerging tools, solving novel problems on real projects — are the ones the current system serves least.
Louisiana's administrative code makes this explicit. State rules specify that PDH credit may not be earned through "informal, non-structured activities such as reading technical journals." Louisiana isn't an outlier. Most state licensing boards draw the same line, requiring that creditable activities be organized, measurable, and provider-verified. The work that keeps a practicing engineer current is, by regulatory definition, not continuing education.
Dean Dalvit reads the IBC cover to cover. He self-studies AI tools for structural calculations. He earns zero CE credit for either. He can sit through a vendor presentation and check the box.
He's thought about what a better model would look like. In Canada, where he holds a Professional Engineering license, the structure is different: actively practicing professionals earn credit through their work, and the burden of formal CE falls on those who aren't practicing — the ones who actually need to prove they're staying current. The underlying logic is the inverse of the U.S. model. Practice is the proof.
That's not a perfect system either. But it points toward something the current U.S. model has largely abandoned: the idea that the work itself is the education.
A CE system that credentialed the learning engineers are already doing — code research, technical problem-solving, peer collaboration, staying current on materials and methods — would look fundamentally different from what most PEs experience today. It would measure outcomes, not attendance. It would trust the professional to know what they need to learn, and build accountability around whether they learned it.
That's a harder system to administer. It's also a more honest one.
The National Society of Professional Engineers officially supports mandatory continuing education for professional engineers in all states. Most state boards that require CE have no mechanism to evaluate whether that CE produced any learning. The gap between those two facts is where most PEs spend their renewal cycles: checking boxes, logging hours, waiting for the certificate to print.
If you honestly assessed whether your last renewal cycle made you a better engineer, what would you say?
