Here are Your Options:
- Give up
- Self-study with help from CyberEd
- Seek another credential
- Take university courses
Option 1 – Give Up
You may be considering giving up.
I get it. I was assigned 19 technical examinations. It was very difficult in the beginning to see a path to completing all those exams while working fulltime and a growing family at home.
Many people never complete their assigned technical exams. They simply had more important things to do with their time and that is okay.
You have to decide for yourself if the cost-benefit is worth it. You may have or may find employment where you can make a good career without the credential.
Option 2 – Self-Study with Help from CyberEd
By far, the quickest and most cost effective way to clear the examinations hurdle is to buckle down and write the exams.
We have tutors available to help you.
A great number of people have completed their technical exams through self-study with no help at all.
We have the solutions to many past technical exams.
Get Effective Study Habits
The first thing you need to succeed is to have effective study habits. For myself, I found this MOOC on Learning How To Learn taught me the correct habits that greatly accelerated my training so that in just 13 months I completed 10 technical exams and the FE exam. That was a marked improvement over the previous 5 years where I only cleared 3 technical exams and the NPPE. The lessons in the MOOC such as the power of active learning, interleaving, and chunking go a long ways.
A simple egg timer app like Productivity Challenge Timer can be a gamechanger. Study in 10 – 15 minute intervals with 3 – 5 minute breaks in between to get into top-end exam shape like an Udarnik.
Make Getting Ready for the Exam a Priority
Impossible, right?
You have work, family and community obligations. Writing a technical exam will always come last unless you decide to commit to abandoning those other obligations for a time.
What I found worked best for me was using 100% of my vacation time to study for technical exams.
Yes, you can write four technical exams in one week. But to do this you need to fully book off two weeks and go to the library 12 hours per day. This is what worked for me and in fact I didn’t study at all outside of that compressed time period.
Use the Right Textbooks the Right Way
The Engineers Canada / PEO syllabus is accompanied by a list of recommended textbooks.
While you should have a high level familiarity with the contents of these books, they rarely are the right choice for self-study.
First, please understand that reading and taking notes from a textbook is the absolutely worst way to spend your time.
What I found works the best is this procedure:
- Go to the local university and get all the student texts relevant to the technical exam subject
- Go to the back of each book to see how many have answers to problems in each chapter
- Reject any and all texts that have few or no answers to problems
- Turn to the problems at the end of the second chapter and get to work.
- Read nothing in the text that does not directly help you solve the problems.
- Further reduce your short list of texts to those you find you are making the best progress.
- Consider buying a couple of the best books – especially for an open-book exam.
A student text book without lots of problems & answers and that is not clearly written is simply a waste of time to use. Do not waste your time.
Write Practice Exams
Ideally you want to write at least three practice exams before each technical exam you write. You want to simulate the exam conditions when you write these practice exams. Plan on writing the first practice exam three or more days in advance of your exam. Then write at least two more before the exam. Go over the solutions to each question to improve your understanding. Writing multiple practice technical exams will give you a complete picture of the questions you may find on the exam.
The regulators have statements on their websites cautioning about relying on using technical exam past papers to understand what will be on the exam. Yes, you should not just use practice exams. You need to study and understand the concepts more broadly. But the truth is that the exams rarely change with most exams repeating the same sorts of questions year after year. If you write at least three practice exams, it will be very unlikely that you will have to answer questions that are unfamiliar to you.
Option 3 – Seek Another Credential
This could be an article to itself. There are many other credentials one may obtain in engineering and in business.
There of course is the Project Management Professional (PMP) and you may find you are better suited to directing engineers and projects rather than being accountable for the technical approval of projects.
There is continued demand for tradesman in Canada. Some trades like CNC machinist or NDT technician pay well and you can get apprenticeship level training and into a job in just a few months. Having an engineering degree and/or engineering experience pairs well with some trades and competent hard-working people can climb high in business from the shop floor just as easy as the engineering office.
Every province has categories such as certified or registered or professional engineering technologists and/or professional technologists or professional licensee (engineering). These credentials come either from the same organization licensing Professional Engineers or from technologist run organizations such as ASET. In some provinces, these credentials have the same approval authority as a Professional Engineer but with a restricted scope of practice.
Option 4 – University Courses
Some go back to school in Canada to obtain a Bachelors or Masters degree then re-apply and have their education re-assessed.
But you may also have the option to meet your technical exam assessment by enrolling in online or on campus engineering courses that are seen as equivalent. You don’t need a degree to become an engineer at all, never-mind a degree from a Canadian university. I never did.
I took an online Engineering Economics course through University of New Brunswick. Truthfully, this was completely a self-study course with credit from a University. It was not considerably different than preparing to write the technical exam and a lot more money. But I knew that I’d be assigned examinations and so I did this course in the time from when I submitted my application to when I got my assessment. It gave me a bit of a jump start.
If you do decide to take course equivalents, make sure you clear them with your regulator. I almost got snagged at this at the very end with that same engineering economics course.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to complete your technical exam assessment. The key action is your commitment.
But there is no way that is going to be faster or more cost effective than self-study with practice exams from CyberEd.