Page 10 - Annual report 2019

STATEMENT BY

THE SECRETARY GENERAL

Secretary General, Dirk BOCHAR

ince its foundation in 1951, the FEANI community has
Sgrown in number of National Members. Today the
geographic boundaries of our network of 32 National
Engineering Organisations largely coincides with those of the
European Higher Education Area, comprising approximately
6 million engineers, covering all engineering disciplines. It
was therefore justified that with the approval of our FEANI
Strategic Plan 2018-2023 at the FEANI General Assembly in
Vienna, October 2017, we could take the initiative to develop
a new platform enabling the engineering community to have
a larger impact on society. The establishment and devel-
opment of this platform – which we entitled and inaugurated • Secondly the further branding of the status and position
as the Engineers Europe Advisory Group (EEAG) – intends to of the engineer in society in the widest sense of the word
be an instrument of which its first and foremost objective : making sure we have sufficient engineers in the future
will be to ensure a more harmonized European voice of the (STEM), but also sufficiently well-educated engineers to
engineers at European and international level. The prepa- meet future challenges (LLL).
ration, inauguration and further development of the EEAG
have definitely been exciting and challenging tasks. • Thirdly we wanted to focus on the societal challenges of
today : the digital society in its broadest meaning.
Preparation : In order to be fully representing the interests
of the engineering community and not merely those of the Development : With those three major and generic objec-
individual engineer, we realized that the input of all concerned tives at hand, we were able to start building a business
stakeholders would be paramount. We needed to determine case which would be appealing for others to get involved
“what” exactly we wanted to achieve and with “whom” we
would need to do that and in which “mode”, in order to be
successful. For this initiative to succeed, we organised a first
preparatory meeting on 11 June 2018 in Brussels with eight
other European Organisations involved with the engineering
profession and engineering education. We identified three
major goals to pursue in common :

• First, the need to become more involved with industry
and European employer Organisations