Effective July 1, 2026, Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) is officially reducing the minimum supervised work experience required for a P.Eng. licence from four years to two. I remember working many long nights over four years just to begin the licensing process — which itself took another six months. As someone who came up through the old system, this change is genuinely bewildering, even after spending considerable time trying to rationalize it. So I decided to put pen to paper (metaphorically, of course) and write out my thoughts.
Let’s be clear: this is the most significant change to Ontario’s engineering licensure framework in decades. It is being marketed as a progressive move to eliminate barriers and streamline the licensing pipeline, and it deserves a more honest assessment than that. The change raises serious, uncomfortable questions about the future of engineering quality, competency, and public safety across the province — questions that PEO, in my view, has not adequately answered.
Why PEO Is Making This Change
To understand the rationale, you have to look at the political pressure bearing down on Ontario’s regulators. This shift is heavily driven by the provincial government’s Fair Access to Regulated Professions and Compulsory Trades Act (FARPACTA), which mandates that regulators dismantle systemic hurdles to integrating internationally educated graduates and foreign-trained professionals into the local workforce. PEO already removed the requirement for Canadian-specific work experience in 2023; the drop to a 24-month minimum is the next step in that same trajectory.
Ontario’s construction and infrastructure sectors are facing a genuine shortage of licensed professionals, and cutting the experience requirement is a fast, administratively simple fix. Many internationally trained engineers arrive in Ontario with years — sometimes decades — of foreign experience that PEO does not fully recognize toward the licensure threshold. For these individuals, the clock effectively restarts upon arrival in Canada, and that frustration is legitimate and worth addressing.
The intention is not without merit. The problem is that the remedy is a blunt instrument — one that lowers the bar for everyone, not just those being treated unfairly.
The Case Against Reducing Experience Requirements
Engineering is not a profession where competence is acquired primarily in a classroom. It is earned on job sites, in design offices, through post-mortems of failed structures, through mentorship, and through the slow accumulation of judgment that only time and exposure can build. I vividly remember waking up at 5:00 a.m. several times a week, for months, to drive across town and meet my mentor for breakfast — picking his brain on structural topics and theories that were troubling me. That kind of mentorship cannot be compressed into a spreadsheet or a competency checklist. Engineering proficiency is built on exposure to rare edge cases, field mistakes, and multi-season project lifecycles — and those experiences simply do not fit neatly into a 24-month window. Four years of supervised practice has historically been a minimum threshold, not a generous one, for producing engineers capable of independent, responsible practice.
Consider the trajectory of a newly graduated engineer. In the first year, they are learning how to read and produce construction drawings, grasping the gap between theory and practice, and making mistakes in an environment where those mistakes can still be caught. By year two, they are growing comfortable with project delivery, client interaction, and code interpretation. Years three and four are where independent judgment genuinely begins to develop — where an engineer starts to recognize what they don’t know, to anticipate problems before they arise, and to make sound decisions under pressure. Cutting the requirement in half truncates precisely this phase of development.
It is also worth noting that this change applies universally — not only to internationally trained engineers. A 23-year-old who graduated last spring and has been working for two years could, under the new framework, stamp drawings and accept full professional liability. Think about that for a moment. The consequences of inadequate engineering judgment are not abstract — they manifest as structural failures, unsafe buildings, costly retrofits, and in the worst cases, injuries and loss of life.
The degradation in quality will not be immediate or obvious. Engineers who trained under the four-year standard will continue to practise for decades. The problems will emerge slowly — in the quality of peer reviews, in the confidence of junior signatories, in the subtle but consequential errors that arise when someone with limited experience encounters a situation they have never seen before and doesn’t yet know what they don’t know.
By prioritizing speed and throughput over seasoned mentorship, PEO risks turning the P.Eng. designation from a badge of mature, independent judgment into a baseline entry-level credential. That designation has historically served as a floor — a signal of minimum competence that clients could rely on regardless of fee. With a weaker standard underpinning it, that signal becomes less reliable. This is particularly concerning in residential and small commercial construction, where clients have no way to independently evaluate engineering quality and depend entirely on the designation as a stand-in for competence.
A Few Genuine Positives
In fairness, there are circumstances where this change could genuinely help. For internationally trained engineers who arrive with real, verifiable experience — those who have spent a decade designing structures in another jurisdiction and simply need a pathway into Canadian practice — a two-year supervised period is arguably appropriate. These individuals do not lack competence; they lack familiarity with Ontario codes, local practices, and our regulatory framework.
It is also worth acknowledging that the new 24-month minimum must be completed after the conferral of an accredited bachelor’s degree — PEO is eliminating pre-graduation co-op credits from counting toward this threshold. That is a sensible safeguard, ensuring the time counted is strictly post-graduate professional practice. PEO also maintains that its 34-point Competency-Based Assessment remains the real gatekeeper, arguing that time alone was never the only measure. If that is true, and if the CBA is rigorously enforced, the harm could be mitigated. But regulatory loosening rarely comes with commensurate tightening elsewhere, and PEO has not clearly explained how the CBA will make up for two fewer years of field exposure.
What the Public Can Do: How to Find an Experienced, Reputable Engineer?
Regardless of how PEO’s requirements evolve, the public has always had the right — and increasingly the responsibility — to be an informed consumer of engineering services. A P.Eng. licence is a necessary credential, but it is not sufficient on its own. Here are six practical steps to evaluate the experience and reputation of a prospective engineer:
1. Verify their licence through PEO’s public register. PEO maintains a publicly accessible directory at peo.on.ca where you can confirm whether an engineer is currently licensed and in good standing. A licence that has been suspended, revoked, or subject to disciplinary action is a serious red flag.
2. Verify the firm’s Certificate of Authorization. Any firm providing engineering services to the public in Ontario must hold a valid Certificate of Authorization (C of A) from PEO. Ask for it, and look for established practices with a documented history in your specific project type.
3. Ask about experience directly — and specifically. Ask how long the engineer has been licensed, how many projects similar to yours they have completed, and whether they have dealt with your specific type of structure or problem before. Request a portfolio spanning at least five to ten years of comparable work. An experienced professional will answer these questions readily.
4. Ask who will sign the drawings — and who will actually do the work. In many firms, the work is performed by junior engineers and reviewed by a senior signatory. Ask explicitly who is preparing your drawings or report, and what the review process looks like. For critical projects, confirm that a senior engineer with a decade or more of post-licensing experience will be actively directing the work and taking legal responsibility for it.
5. Use professional directories beyond PEO. The Consulting Engineers of Ontario (CEO) and the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) maintain directories of established consulting firms and senior practitioners with demonstrated track records — a useful starting point when hiring for complex or high-stakes work.
6. Treat price as a signal, not a target. Engineering fees on residential and small commercial projects are modest relative to the value of the asset being protected. A structural assessment that comes in $400 cheaper than a competitor’s quote may reflect a less experienced engineer, a thinner scope, or both. The cheapest opinion is rarely the best one.
A Better Path Forward
Look — I get it. PEO has a difficult mandate: regulate a profession in the public interest while navigating political and economic pressures that frequently pull in the opposite direction. The move to reduce experience requirements is an understandable response to real workforce and immigration challenges. But this profession derives its value, and its public trust, from the rigour of its standards. When those standards are relaxed, the costs are diffuse and slow to appear — but they are real.
A better path would have been a tiered or expedited pathway specifically for internationally trained engineers with verifiable, substantial foreign experience, while preserving the four-year requirement for new graduates entering the profession for the first time. That approach would have addressed the legitimate frustration of experienced foreign professionals without lowering the standard for everyone else. Instead, Ontario has chosen a uniform reduction that will shape the quality and confidence of its engineering workforce for a generation.
The public deserves experienced engineers. The profession deserves standards worth having. And Ontario deserves a regulator willing to defend both.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and reflect the professional opinion of Sinitski Structural Engineering Ltd. They do not constitute legal advice and are not an official position of PEO or any regulatory body.