Membership and Registration

Engineering is involved in every aspect of human life – food and accommodation, transportation and infrastructure, medicine, communication and entertainment to name a few.

Engineering professionals work at various levels of expertise and exercise different degrees of direct responsibility – some jobs are small and routine, others are worth millions of dollars and affect the safety of thousands of people.

There are three engineering occupational groups within the wider engineering profession: professional engineers, engineering technologists, and engineering technicians. Before specifying or employing engineering expertise, it is important to gauge the level of engineering expertise needed.

• For complex engineering use a professional engineer.
• For broadly-defined engineering use an engineering technologist.
• For well-defined engineering use an engineering technician.

IPENZ operates competence-based registers for each of the three occupational groups - professional engineers, engineering technologists and engineering technicians – reflecting the three competence-based membership classes of IPENZ.

There are two kinds of quality mark used by New Zealand engineers:

• Openly available registers of current competence, indicating that engineers have undertaken an assessment of competence within the last 5 years.
• Continued membership of a professional body (such as IPENZ)

More information about each of the three engineering roles and the associated qualifications and quality marks is available in the booklet engineering edge.