Melissa Wheeler, M.ASCE, your Region 5 Director, is a member of the Georgia Section and the Transmission Project Management organization at Georgia Power Company in Atlanta, Georgia.

Melissa represented you at a day-long strategic planning session, held in advance of the regular July Board of Direction meeting, to examine the trends and issues facing the civil engineering profession and ASCE as its professional association.

At the July 17 session in Victoria, BC, the Board continued a strategic planning process that most recently centered on scanning the environment to identify issues that are affecting how civil engineers practice and how they can best serve the public welfare.

The Board entered its planning session with about 30 professional issues and 15 association issues to consider, the latter being those related to the health of ASCE as an organization as it works to serve its members, the profession, and society. The Board’s ultimate goal is to create a prioritized “radar screen” of perhaps 15 to 20 issues that will then serve as a guide to determining the small number of strategic initiatives that will receive special Board focus over the coming years. On the table would be the possible continuation of one or more of our three existing strategic initiatives--infrastructure renewal, sustainable infrastructure, and raising the bar on the education required for professional engineering licensure—along with the consideration of potential new ones.

After priority voting to close the day’s session, the interim list of professional issues was reduced to about 20 for the next stage of consideration. In addition to the issues that led to our current three strategic initiatives, those that received Board interest included:

• The question of how well the continuing education used to fulfill the requirements for licensure renewal keep engineers up to date on the needed civil engineering body of knowledge.
• The factors that influence attracting the best and brightest students to civil engineering careers.
• Reducing infrastructure lifecycle costs and fostering optimization of infrastructure investments.
• The recent trend of proposed state legislation calling into question the purpose of professional licensure in general.
• The civil engineer’s ability to become a master innovator and integrator of technology in leading multi-disciplinary planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of sustainable infrastructure projects.
• Among several others.

Regarding association issues, the Board trimmed its list from 15 to 10, showing interest in:

• Transitioning student members to associate member status, and attracting and retaining younger members.
• How associations and their local components must adapt to stand out and thrive in the new reality of 21st century technologies, lifestyles, workplaces, and ways of interacting.
• How the ever-growing civil engineering population outside the U.S. raises opportunities and challenges in balancing resource investment to address the needs and expectations of both domestic and international members.
• The threats to ASCE publications revenue from government mandates for open access to the results of federally funded research and from the competition of larger publishers, among other factors.
• How new learning platforms, sources of learning, and modes of assessing and documenting educational achievement will impact ASCE’s approach to educational offerings.
• Among others.
  

Having explored and discussed the broad array of issues on its interim list, the Board will continue to refine it offline in August, and then seek to establish a final prioritized radar screen of issues at its October meeting. Board members are interested in your views on the issues they are considering.

To share your views, or other ideas on how ASCE can better serve its members and the profession, please email Melissa.