Abstract:
Licensing is a type of occupational regulation (O.R) used by licensing boards of different
countries and states to license contractors. Wyoming state was the first to start licensing
engineers and surveyors and soon after other states and countries followed. Today majority
of countries have some form of licensing requirement for contractors. Pakistan
Engineering Council (PEC) also license contractors and consultants since 1976. PEC has
updated its licensing requirement multiple times throughout this period using a committee
of selected members with almost no contribution from overall construction industry
stakeholders/ professionals i.e., contractors, consultants, clients, civil engineers, and
academia researchers. Also, many researchers have wondered about the effectiveness and
adequacy of licensing requirements for contractors. A two-phase questionnaire survey is
conducted to first shortlist and rank the identified licensing objectives and licensing criteria
using relative importance index and to later identify the required values for each criteria
using SPSS 22, pie charts, and histograms. Cronbach’s Alpha is used to check the
reliability of first questionnaire while Chi-square analysis is used to check the significance
of second phase results. It was found that the requirement of equipment and machinery,
specific number of engineers, engineer’s experience in years, supervisory certificate, and
committee decision are redundant requirements and hence should be removed while PEC
needs to incorporate the requirement of 2-character references, exam, as well as on average
20% - 30% recommended change in existing requirement values of different criteria. it
was also identified that PEC needs to update the existing Professional Credit Points
calculation formula as well as suspend licensing process of firms that have 3 litigation
cases in process.
