2014 NSPE Vice President Candidate Questions for WRITTEN Kenneth Skinger, P.E., Esq. Deadline March 1, 2014 1. There are a handful of states whose numbers have dropped to a point where they have difficulties finding board members and maintaining financial solvency to keep their paid staff employed. Do you see any ways that National may aid these states in maintaining their societies? The Massachusetts Society was facing these three issues when I became an active participant at the Board of Directors meetings. The first thing we did was to make a careful evaluation of which administrative services were essential to continued operation of the society. Having identified those services, we identified those which could be performed by members of the society rather than by paid staff. We determined that maintenance of financial accounts could be done more efficiently by the Treasurer, at no cost to the society than, by our administrative service bureau. Similarly, we determined that our monthly meeting could be held at the facilities of the companies with which the officers are affiliated, at no cost to the society, rather than at the offices of the service bureau. The evaluation revealed that MSPE needed a telephone answering service, mail address and occasional clerical support. We located a service bureau that could provide the support we needed at approximately twenty percent (20%) of the cost of our then current service bureau. National could assist these state societies to make a similar evaluations and to locate budget friendly service bureaus. After four years of intense effort, MSPE showed a small gain in members rather than a loss. This came about through energizing the existing membership to make personal invitations to PE associates. It was helped substantially by a visit by NSPE President Dan Wittliff. National could collaborate with of the state societies to schedule an event on a matter of concern to the membership such as: changes to educational requirements; minimizing professional liability; use of non-pes to make technical decisions within government organizations; or desirability of encouraging state boards to require that engineering documents be sealed by a Coordinating Professional when more than one PE or A is working on the project. The event should be scheduled such that an appropriate national officer will participate in the proceedings. Further, national could share with the state society a list of existing members who are in danger of being dropped for non-renewal, as soon as two weeks before the renewal is due and again immediately after the due date has passed. This would provide the state society with an opportunity to make personal contact with the individual and encourage him or her to continue membership. Further, national could work with the state society to develop a program with the state board of registration to deliver the PE Certificates to newly registered PEs at an event jointly hosted by the state society and the board of registration. This would provide an opportunity for the state society to meet the new PEs and explain the benefits of being a member of the PE societies. Ken Skinger Responses to CSC Questionnaire pg 1 of 5
2. One of the goals of the NSPE Strategic Plan is to develop strong, seamless chapter-state-national partnerships. What short-term steps will you take to implement, and what long-term measures would you continue, to attain this goal? My view is that the key to success of the partnership effort is communications between and among the chapter, state and national groups. Communications can be improved by assigning to national level officers and directors the responsibility to communicate with the specific state societies on at least a bi-monthly basis. This communication should be an information exchange that allows national to inform the state societies about successful and failed strategies for member retention, recruitment and successful events, which increase, or at least maintain, member involvement. It should be a forum in which the needs and concerns of the state societies can be brought to the attention of our national leaders and venue for both the state and national societies to exchange ideas that may energize our members. In the near term, we need to create a national meeting protocol that attracts all our members. This could be accomplished by re-instituting educational programs at the annual meeting, increasing the social and networking opportunities or in other ways. Members need to feel that participation in the annual meeting is personally and professionally rewarding. Participation in the annual meeting should be something the members look forward to because it provides a happy blend of professional development, networking and social enjoyment with their peers. Over the longer term, national needs to put more focus on the benefits the state and national societies provide to members and less on the benefits the state and national societies together bring to the public. Often people are altruistic and are pleased to do good things for the community and humankind, but they are always making judgments about how to allocate their limited personal assets to obtain benefits for themselves. We need to have members think, I cannot afford not to be a member because I will loose certain benefits that improve or maintain the quality of my life. 3. NSPE leadership is considering changing the name of 3-tier membership and interest groups to something else. What ideas do you have for changing these names? I think that it would be very useful to drop the name and structure of interest groups and replace it with groups organized around practice areas. Practice areas might be power, pharmaceutics, transportation and so forth. The goal would be to engage PE in these practice areas from across the spectrum of employment arrangements including those in private practice, government, education and others who have diverse technical specialties such as structural, mechanical, electrical and others. This would provide the participants with diverse perspectives about practice in the specific areas. The participants would benefit from synergistic interaction because they would speak a common language, face similar challenges, but have a different focus as a result of their employment. The result would be increased awareness of the interface issues and understanding financial, marketing, public relations and political realities that determine success in the practice area. 4. As a past officer in a state and/or national office of NSPE, what was your strategy to increase membership levels? Did it work? What made it work? What percentage increase did you see as a result of your strategy? If it didn t work, what would you have done differently? How will you use that experience when serving as president of NSPE? The strategy to increase membership in Massachusetts was to first determine why membership was falling and then to identify initiatives to address the causes. We discovered that there are a number factors contributing to membership decline. Among them is the fact that the technical community is no longer co-located in small geographic areas, which made participation in professional society events more difficult and is an issue for most, if not all, professional societies. For example, the time Ken Skinger Responses to CSC Questionnaire pg 2 of 5
required to participate in a luncheon event has such an impact on time away from the work location that very often it is impractical to participate. In addition many organizations that supported their employees participation in professional societies through contributions to the cost of membership simply stopped providing such support. This caused employees to evaluate whether their limited funds would bring them as much benefit from membership in a particular society as could be obtained by allocating their funds to different purpose. We found that the locational disaggregation of the members work places reduced significantly the personal interaction among members and many no longer felt a personal relationship with other members. This resulted in members becoming passive rather than active participants. Our goal was, and is, to energize our members so their participation in the society would increase. Our first effort was to increase written communication from the officers to the members. This proved to be expensive and ineffective. We realized that written communication in any form is impersonal and members did not feel an improved sense of camaraderie with fellow members or society officers. We continued to lose about ten percent (10%) of our members annually. It became clear that we needed more personal interaction with existing members, if we were to energize the society. We assigned to each member of the board a list of members to contact personally. This was done through telephonic and in person communications. The result has been to reverse the annual loss of members. In the past year, for the first time in many years, our membership increased by a few percent. We recognize that much more effort is required to sustain this improvement and to reach our goal of ten percent (10%) annual increase. I believe that the success that MSPE has experienced can be replicated by other state societies. Tip O Neil, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, once said, all politics is local. While that may not apply directly to the success of a professional society, successful recruitment and retention at the state level will benefit NSPE greatly. In addition to providing programmatic support to state societies, NSPE can energize members by developing activities which are sufficiently attractive to members that they will not only participate but invite their non-member associates to participate. Such participation will encourage non-members to join. 5. The National Society of Professional Engineers recommends phasing out existing industrial exemptions in states that have them. How would you lead NSPE s support of a state society facing an unanticipated, aggressive move to pass a broad-scope industrial exemption law which is championed by a strong, well-funded politically aggressive industrial trade group? The legislation is extremely broad exempting corporation employees and employees of the corporation s affiliates from engineering and surveying registration. This is an extremely important question that is difficult to answer as a hypothetical. It is clear that to be successful in preventing the enactment of such a law under the circumstances described would require a fully coordinated effort by dedicated team of national and state members. The first step would be to understand what made it possible to foil the effort by the State of Connecticut to use unlicensed people to determine the viability of capital projects, as well as how it was possible to defeat a proposed sunset law on Professional Engineer Registration in California. I think our best chance for success would be to draw an analogy between the exemption from the engineering registration law for corporate employees and an exemption from the medical registration law for employees of medical service centers which provide medical services to individual patients. Nurses, doctors, dentists, and nurse practioners provide important, often complex treatment to patients that strongly impact the patients health, welfare and quality of life. Similarly, professional engineers provide services that strongly impact the health, welfare, safety of individuals and sustainability of society. In addition, I would investigate the possibility of enlisting the support of other professional societies such the associations for medical doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists and others who provide services that affect the health, welfare and safety of the public and could be subject to similar initiatives. Ken Skinger Responses to CSC Questionnaire pg 3 of 5
6. What are three things NSPE is currently doing very well? What are three things that need to be improved? Given current resources, how would you improve the things we are not doing well without adversely affecting the items we are doing well? Well Done NSPE does an outstanding job of presenting a very positive image of professional engineers and the engineering profession to the public in general, the media, as well as to the business and political communities. Through email and other electronic media NSPE keeps members informed of business, financial, ethical and political issues that may impact the practice of engineering and also highlights significant engineering accomplishments. It does an excellent job of managing the finances of the organization and assuring transparency of financial transactions. Improvement Needed Development and implementation of a strategic plan for member retention and recruitment Providing opportunities and incentives for members to interact with each other Communicating to members the benefits of membership Actions Continue the Race for Relevance initiative and assist state societies to develop outreach programs that include: 1. Working with the boards of registration to develop an event sponsored by the state societies at which the board of registration presents newly licensed individuals their certification of registration; 2. Identifying way to enhance personal interaction with members, such as personal contact by the officers to individual members; Identifying to state societies the members whose renewal is due two weeks before the due date; Providing, on quarterly basis information about successful and unsuccessful recruitment and retention initiatives used by other state societies; Revising the format of the annual meeting to provide incentives for members to attend, such as pdh sessions acceptable for credit towards mandatory continuing education requirements in all states. Encouraging greater regional communication and interaction among the state societies, through development regional event calendars, such as the one being developed that will launched in the Northeast Region before the July national meeting. Developing a list serve program that will allow members to communicate with each other about available and needed technical support and opportunities. This could be patterned after a highly successful program operated by the Academy of Trial Attorneys. I am anxious to reach out to adapt successful programs developed by other professional societies. Development of a succinct statement of membership benefits that have direct impact on individual members. 7. Why do you want to be NSPE President? I believe that every profession needs a strong organization which promotes that profession s mission for the benefit of the public and works to ensure that rules of practice for the profession are reasonable for the practioners, assures that the public trust is honored, and confirms that the health, safety and welfare of the public are maintained and enhanced through the activities of profession s practioners. In order to accomplish these goals, the society must have leaders who are dedicated, knowledgeable and experienced. I am convinced that the responsible practice of engineering is supported by NSPE in a way and to an extent that is not and cannot be accomplished by technical engineering societies organized along discipline lines. While those societies make invaluable contributions to technical improvements, Ken Skinger Responses to CSC Questionnaire pg 4 of 5
unlike NSPE, they do not enjoy the benefits gained by interaction among professionals of various disciplines nor are they dedicated to the prime directive that engineers shall, above all else, ensure the health, safety and welfare of the public. I believe the NSPE President should be a practicing professional engineer, who has experience in a wide array of professional, business and community activities, who has had the opportunity work in more than one employment environment, such as private practice, manufacturing, government or education and possess a burning desire to lead a team that will continue the process of re-energizing the members of our society. The person should have at least some experience in finance, and construction as well as engineering design. In light of NSPE s membership issues, it is desirable the President have experience with the successful re-invigoration of a professional society. As result, of my experience as an engineer in private practice with a very small firm and as an engineer employed by four major engineering organizations with national and international scope, as well as the managing director of an investment trust, a member of a team that re-energized the Massachusetts Society of Professional Engineers, a team that rescued an international business society from the brink of oblivion and as an engineer who has the experience of working in manufacturing, government and private practice environments, I am uniquely qualified to serve as President of NSPE. Therefore, it is my duty to serve and give back to the profession that has greatly enhanced my quality of life. If elected, it will be a great honor to serve the profession. Ken Skinger Responses to CSC Questionnaire pg 5 of 5