After practising engineering since 1996 after my return from overseas, I found that there is not much improvement in the growth and career prospect for a design engineer in the field of mechanical and electrical in construction industry. In fact, situations had gotten much worse since the year of 2018 with less mega projects. And the year of 2020 did not help at all with major retrenchment or cut in salary. And here is why I think that engineering is not getting any where in Malaysia.
The first major hurdle that young engineers must face upon graduation is registration with board of engineers Malaysia (BEM). Engineers must first register with BEM as graduate engineer before they can practise as engineers in Malaysia. This is actually a good practise with good intention to regulate the engineers in Malaysia. But the caveat lies on the requirement to graduate with accredited universities by the board and the requirement to get sponsorship from practising professional engineers in the country.
It is crucial to note that not all universities which offer engineering degrees are recognised by the board. And for overseas universities, only universities which are recognised by Washington Accord are accepted by BEM. Thus, we have graduates from local universities and colleges who have to complete top up programmes or start a new degree program in order to register with BEM. However, we need to question why top universities for engineering program in Netherland and Germany are not recognised. In fact, some of them have been ranked top 100 universities in the world. While universities from Peru, Pakistan and Indonesia are in the Washington Accord. I am not saying that we should not accept Washington Accord but it must not form our sole basis for acceptance of practising engineers in Malaysia.
The second road block for registration of young engineers in BEM is the requirement to get local practising professional engineers to certify their certificates. That should not be necessary as young engineers are not exposed to the industry and may not know of any practising professional engineers. In fact, any verification and certification should be from the universities in the first place and for older certificates, certification from commissioner of oath or lawyer firm who sighted the original document should be sufficient. It also reliefs the burden of professional engineers to certify which should involve sighting the original documents and also verifying from the universities concerned. In fact, most engineers would not even complete the latter steps before certifying the documents.
The next challenge to the profession is the salary. With the entrance salary of RM2000 to RM3500 per month, this poses a challenge to young engineers who now have to survive on own their own and pay off their educational loan. With salary of RM2000, these engineers do not fare off better than the basic salary holder RM1500.
Then, there is a challenge of getting reasonable fees for consultancy practises. BEM has set a basic scale of fees in accordance to the cost of the project. This scale of fees was never revised since 1998 as compared to architect scale of fees which was revised in 2010 and QS in 2014. It is worth to mention that not only was our scale of fees not revised since more than 20 years ago, it only serves as a guideline until year 2022. In fact, there were years that government tendered out consultancy service not in accordance to scale of fees and caused competition among the consultants. Then there are consultants who undercut each other in their fees offer just to survive. In fact, if engineering is a professional service, this should be prohibited. Bargaining and haggling would only lead to low quality of services as now the successful engineers in their bid would need to cover more projects with the same staffs to maintain the same earning. Then comes the challenge of PUBLIC projects getting smaller and smaller which means that the fees for each project would be cut down drastically. However, the amount of meetings for each project remains.
Then there is enforcement by certain department in the government that the actual fees eligible to the consultants is the minimum of the actual construction cost or the preliminary estimate by the department. With estimate that is based on similar projects 10 or 15 years ago, of course the consultant fees would be reduced. Such unfair practises must not be allowed in the industry.
The worst of the brunt is felt by the M&E consultant group as fees is calculated based on a certain percentage of construction cost. Honestly speaking, this is very wrong because the cost of construction of M&E components is only a fraction of the project cost but the amount of time spent designing is substantial. Thus to adopt the same percentage as the other engineering disciplines would be unfair. Then these engineers are expected to attend the same number of meetings and to even carry out additional duties such as preparation of bill of quantities and progress claim. Thus in order to survive, the number of projects assigned to each M&E engineer is substantially higher. Then come the big bosses from the clients who insist that the principals of the consultancy services should attend each meeting. Well, honestly speaking, is that even practical? Yet, the M&E consultancy firms are forced to put in manhours for the principals to attend to each project. And is that even the end of the problems and challenges faced by engineers? No, that is not the end as most of our public projects is Malaysia is project “sakit”, so the number of hours put in by the consultant engineers is much more than initial calculation. And to make matter worse, when project timeline is extended, most of the time there is no extra allowance for reimbursement to be increased for travelling and attending meetings.
Once the engineers pass the stage of registration and getting a job, then there is the challenge of moving on in the profession. To begin with, my experience with the local graduates is that what they learn in universities do not match up with our requirement to carry out the job. As such, the industry ends up training the graduates from fresh. At best, the only relevance is what they do for the final year projects. Local universities should start offering electives which are relevant to the industries and taught by the industries. Too much focus on research works in local universities lead to graduates who are not relevant to the common industries. The government then has to take action by enforcing the HRDF contribution for all industries with workforce exceeding 5 pax, so that the young engineers can be trained. However, do you know that federal and state bodies are exempted from paying contribution to HRDF? So, I am doubtful that the new entrances into the government bodies can get the trainings that they much require, with focus of any departmental allocations will first go to high ranking officers who need to maintain their CPD.
Now that if the engineers get past these challenges, the next thing they faced is the registration as professional engineers. There are 2 stages, the first stage being professional engineers and the second stage is for practising professional engineers. To register as professional engineers, they need to attend the outcome based professional assessment examination (PAE) which consist of submitting training records in summary and detailed description in 2 separate forms. Engineers now can submit to sit for PAE once they have registered with BEM as graduate engineers for 3 years and can get at least one professional engineer with same discipline to sponsor them. However, their training must be relevant to their degree and the professional engineer discipline applied. Here comes the underlying problem. In the past, there are only 4 major factions of engineering degrees in most universities, namely civil and structure, mechanical and manufacturing, electrical & electronics and chemical. In recent years, universities have offered specialised courses such as materials science engineering, fire engineering, aerodynamics engineering, geotechnical engineering, etc. These new sets of graduate engineers would encounter problems to find sponsors for their PAE applications and thus may remain stuck in their status. BEM should actually relax the rules for mentor and sponsorship of what can be covered by each discipline.
The second stage of development for professional engineers is to become practising professional engineers. Engineers who have earned their professional engineers can now apply to sit for examinations to qualify the second stage. However, there are no past year questions available to study for it. Honestly speaking in my long career since 1996, I have not taken any external examinations that do not offer past year papers as general guidelines to the syllabus covered. Apparently from here say in the industry, the past year papers are not published because the questions get repeated over the years. That means if one has failed a number of examinations, the probability of passing is higher, but how does that make one to qualify in terms of competencies? The second stage written examination should be focusing on general competencies of the engineers in the discipline applied for, and not niche knowledge in specific fields of engineering. When past year papers are published with expected answers, the general public can comment on the quality of the questions and answers upon which the examination committees can learn and improve. Multiple choice questions should be discouraged as these type of questions force candidates to choose from a set of possible answers and when questions and answers are wrongly framed, the candidates cannot address the issues. For example, you cannot ask for best selection of chiller plant configurations, if you only express the peak load and the minimum night load. The load experienced in a system is dependent on the load configuration over the time unless it is a fixed process load in comparison to building load.
Finally in development of codes and standards, they should be published in websites that can be accessed by the public for comments for over a certain period depending on the contents and scope of the codes and standards. A short one month period may not be sufficient. Once published, the publishers should ensure that the engineers are made aware of the availability for comment by circulating through relevant bodies such as BEM, IEM, IFE, etc. This is practised in UK for BS EN code and approved document B and also in America for NFPA. The latest practise in UK is commendable as the comments can be made direct in website where the draft document is published. This is to ensure that there is less mistakes and ambiguities in our codes and standards when they are ready to be enforced. It is note worthy to mention that our standards are mostly adopted from other standards with minor modification to suit our climate and infrastructure, but sometimes the amendments are not suitable in our context. Thus, public comment is important.
All in all, there could be other matters which need to be addressed that I have not covered in this article but I hope that this article will serve as precedence to more other articles from the public. It is imperative that we TAKE ACTIONS NOW to address the issue before we face the bigger challenge of extinction of good quality local engineers and have to rely on the import of engineers from neighbouring countries such as Philippines, Indonesia, India and maybe even Myanmar. If we do not curb the disease now, soon it will take over us and we will become critical to the point of non-recovery.
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