Journal Reviews Should Count toward Continuing Education

Continuing education has become an important part of professional engineering registration. Most state boards require professional engineers to acquire a certain number of continuing education units (CEUs) or professional development hours (PDHs) over some specified time to maintain registration.

The exact nature of the activities that count toward registration varies from state to state. An example from the Illinois rules (http://www.ilga.gov/commission/jcar/admincode/068/068013800003250R.html) follows:

Professional Development Activities shall include, but not be limited to:

1.

Successful completion of a college or university course in the area of professional engineering, related sciences and engineering ethics. One semester hour completed shall equal 15 PDHs and one quarter hour shall equal 10 PDHs.

2.

Successful completion of professional engineering courses or programs in which professional development hours are earned.

3.

Active participation and successful completion of professional engineering programs, seminars, tutorials, workshops, short courses, online or in-house courses. Credit will be given for self study courses only if an examination has been completed by the licensee and graded by the sponsor.

4.

Attending program presentations at related technical or professional meetings.

5.

Teaching or instructing: Teaching credit is valid for teaching a course or seminar for the first time only. Two PDHs will be earned for every hour of teaching. This does not apply to faculty in the performance of their regularly assigned duties.

6.

Authoring papers or articles that appear in nationally circulated journals or trade magazines or presented to a professional society or organization. A maximum 10 PDHs per paper or presentation per renewal are allowed for this activity.

7.

Receiving a patent within the renewal period. Ten PDHs may be earned per patent.

8.

Active participation on a committee or holding an office in a professional or technical society. Two PDHs will be awarded per committee membership or office held. A maximum of 8 PDHs may be accepted per prerenewal period.

Keeping up with the latest developments in the profession is highly desirable, and there are many ways to accomplish this goal. For some, however, keeping up with the latest advances in the field is the best way to maintain skills, and reading a journal like Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management can help an engineer stay on top of the state of the art. Of course, an important part of continuing education is documenting education, and it is almost impossible to document reading a journal.

Reading a journal paper should be supplemented with some type of thorough, critical, written assessment of the paper. This is precisely the type of activity that journal reviewers conduct. In addition to providing a service to the profession, journal reviewers advance their knowledge of cutting-edge work in a manner that can be documented.

This writer is not aware of state boards that explicitly accept time spent on journal reviews as continuing education time even though it appears to meet the definition of continuing education and can be inferred from the wording in some rules. The writer recommends that state boards accept time spent on reviews for peer-review journals as an acceptable continuing-education activity. Reviewing a journal submission should carry a standard 2 PDH or 0.2 CUE value to remove ambiguity from the assignment of credit even though reviewing usually takes more than 2 hours.

Continuing education activities need to be audited on occasion. Reviewers should be required to save copies of their reviews as documentation of their work. Boards would need to respect the confidentiality of the review process so that any reviews are not made public.

The editorial board from a single journal cannot change the policies of the range of state boards. Engineers are encouraged to contact their state boards to recommend the change to explicitly accept journal review activities as continuing education. They should feel free to use this editorial for support.

It’s time to give much-deserved credit to review activities.