Best Practices for California Fundamentals of Engineering and Professional Engineering License Exams for Immigrant Engineers

This paper addresses some critical issues and challenges faced by immigrant engineers when they take the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) license exam or the Professional Engineering (PE) license exam in California and across the United States.Each year, thousands of engineers come to the United States from different parts of the world.A large number of these engineers choose California as their permanent home.After arrival, most of these engineers realize that they need additional preparation to meet the professional standards set by the state government and other agencies.In the case of immigrant engineers, there is a tremendous amount of hard work and effort required by them to prepare for the FE exam, followed by the PE license exam.One of the authors of this paper recently emigrated from the Middle East and went through this challenging process himself to get his California PE license.He has developed a training program based on his personal experience with the intention of helping others to obtain their engineering licenses as well.More than 50% of the immigrant engineers who attended one of these training programs successfully completed their exams and received their Engineer-in-Training certification, which is a pass rate higher than the national average.This paper describes the curriculum, and best practices, and strategies adopted for this program.While this program was specifically designed for recent immigrants in California, lessons learned can be applied to other students interested in preparing for the FE or PE exams as part of the engineering licensing process.