‘50,000 engineers not accredited’

The Saudi Council of Engineers has said that 50,458 engineers working in Saudi Arabia are still not accredited with the council.
This translates to only 119,542 of the 30,000 Saudis and 140,000 foreign nationals working in the Kingdom being professionally accredited. The professional accreditation regulation was finally approved by the commission to avoid forgery of engineering certificates both within and outside the country.
Accordingly, all engineers and employees of the engineering profession in the Kingdom must professionally register with the commission.
The objective behind registration is to assess academic qualifications and practical experience of those working in the profession and to help continuously evolve and develop skills of engineers and the engineering profession. Additionally, the commission is looking to create a professional record for each engineer to document their qualifying status and professional experience.
The engineer must acquire a particular number of occupational points in the three years after obtaining a professional degree: 80 points for an engineering degree, 60 points for assistant engineer, 60 points for professional engineer, and 50 points for consultant engineer.
By granting accreditation, the commission aims to reduce cases of fraudulent certifications, especially foreign certificates, following the detection of numerous fraudulent cases by the commission in the past few years.
The classification and accreditation process will make the commission a platform for the work of engineers while reducing faltering projects and poor and inefficient engineering work. The commission is functioning in cooperation with several universities outside the Kingdom to adopt new regulations to help verify the certification presented to the commission for accreditation.
Dr. Ghazi Al-Abbasi, secretary-general of the commission, noted that professional accreditation and the engineering job structure will provide efficiency in the field of engineering and will help eliminate stalled projects as a result of poor performance and lack of regulations.
At least three cases of forged certificates were detected daily on average last year.
About 1000 forged engineering certificates were expected to be caught by the end of the year. With new regulatory efforts, the commission hopes to reduce this number significantly, as well as prevent people with fake certificates from practicing the profession and informing authorities about such cases, he said.
According to Al-Abbasi, the commission will also support engineers by sending them to training workshops and by offering programs in various regions of the Kingdom in collaboration with accredited training bodies.