Are Engineers Overloaded? How Many Registered Engineers Are Actively Practicing?

Gathering this data may help our community understand risk exposure to the public related to fatigued engineering supervision practitioners.

Findings So Far

I'm honing in on an estimate between 50,000 and 200,000 active, registered individual licensed professionals. This is an estimate based on what data I could find:

• I found a complete list of the roster in Texas, and in my market (mechanical, electrical, and architectural), there are approximately 20k active registrants. It seems a sample population from Texas is a reasonable starting point since it's such a large state.

• NCEES reports indicate numbers as high as 800,000, which doesn't align with the labor statistics data for total employees in our industry (about 700k).

• The NCEES data represents only total registrants and does not account for multi-state licensure. If all registrants are registered in 50 states, 800k licenses could theoretically be as few as 16,000.

If you are interested in why I am curious, here's a quick explainer:

The Metric: Produce a Simple Risk Indicator to Warn When Engineers Are Overloaded

I seek to measure "how many things are being built under our supervision right now" and then compare it to "how many people are licensed to produce that supervision." Some portion of construction GDP can estimate the numerator for the comparison. The denominator (the number of active practicing professionals) is challenging data to find.

The Goal: Create a Training Framework to Rapidly Produce Designers that Can Be Trusted to Perform Tasks Under Direct Supervision And Control.

I'm working on solving this problem at PermitZIP: recruiting is challenging, expensive, and high-risk. What if we just trained better? What if our industry focused on training instead of recruiting from each other?

All the work we've put into the training program has me wondering exactly how much this problem persists throughout the industry. And if it does, how will we deal with the collective risk of all available resources at and exceeding capacity? Recruiting from each other does not address the public risk problem. Better training allows us to introduce new talent with structure.

Thanks!

If you have any resources or thoughts, or ideas, please share! This has consumed my thoughts for months; we've seen excellent results in our new training approaches. I hope to share more as I learn more!

- Kenny Shultz