Encouraging excellence in engineering through the use of a simple competency model to focus professional development

140,000 members who are, or have been, engaged in activities covering most industrial sectors and applications. If standards defining best practice for engineers performing company activities can be extracted from this experience it should be beneficial, to engineers, companies and academic institutions of higher education. Today, most informed opinion would argue that such standards should be based on a model of personal competency. This paper introduces a novel, goal-orientated, competency model, which is used to capture best practice. The research, which led to the model, is described together with the advantages of the model over other competency models or schemes. An overview is provided of how the competency standards should be used by professional engineers wishing to increase their personal worth, companies wishing to improve their performance and by academic institutions needing to obtain a better understanding of industry´s expectations of new graduates.