Originally Posted by
wlaxer
In the US, there are plenty of legitimate engineers without licenses. The PE is generally only a requirement in civil engineering, other industries have other safeguards. Unfortunately, there's a lot of abuse of the term too.
I know of one aerospace engineer that was required to have a PE because his employer wanted a PE to sign off on their drawings. I'm not aware of any state that allows non-PE's to formally represent themselves using the word engineer. It is somewhat inconvenient for those of us non-licensed individuals that practice engineering, but in practice this is the first I've heard of anyone pressing the issue. Seems to me that the most a licensing board can do is ask, "are you representing yourself as an engineer?" and if the answer is no, their response should be, "ok, our bad."
When I was an undergrad, my department had EIT licensing prep classes. That was the only place I ever heard about the legal requirements for calling yourself an engineer. I'm guessing that there are a lot of unlicensed engineers out there that have no idea of this.