Page 19 - Annual Report 2014-2015

REPORT OF THE
BELGIAN FEANI NATIONAL COMMITTEE
REPORTS FROM NATIONAL MEMBERS 19
Comité des Ingénieurs Belges - Belgisch Ingenieurscomité (CIBIC)
Year of Adhesion: 2008
Declared engineers: 54 000
Number of EUR INGs: 326
Member associations: The main Member Associations connected with CIBIC are the Fédération Royale des Associations Belges d'Ingénieurs civils, d'ingénieurs agronomes et bioingénieurs (FABI), Koninklijke Vlaamse Ingenieursvereniging (KVIV), Union Francophone des Associations d'Ingénieurs Industriels de Belgique (UFIIB), Vlaamse Ingenieurskamer (VIK)
Rue Hobbemastraat 2 - 1000 Brussels
Tel: +32 2 734 75 10 - Fax: +32 2 734 53 15 cibic@cibic.be - www.cibic.be
The Belgian engineering education has been reorganized some years ago as follows: in Flanders the two Master studies, ‘Ing.’ (industrial engineers, 4 years) and ‘ir.’ (civil and bio engineers, 5 years) respectively, are part of the university education and, as such, the engineering master degrees from the University Colleges (Ing.) have been integrated into the universities. In the French speaking part of the country the ‘ir.’ programs are part of the univer- sities (5 years), the ‘Ing.’ are part of the University Colleges with duration of 5 years as well. On the Flemish side the engineering organizations KVIV (ir.) and VIK (Ing.) merged and since January 2016 the new organization is called “IE-NET Engineering Society” (ir. + Ing.). In the French speaking community the two organizations FABI (ir.) and UFIIB (Ing.) are still organized separately but have a strong cooperation through the IB platform (Ingénieurs Belges). CIBIC is an umbrella organization for these different organizations and represents all the Belgian engineers with a Master’s degree. To be more complete and trans- parent: the bachelors in the domain of engineering are not represented by CIBIC, and to our knowledge have no professional organization(s) to represent them.
A full activity report should include the activities of at least these three organizations. The three of them organize a range of activities directed at their members, are active in CPD, have activities in defending the interests of their members and a lot more. The organization patterns are however quite different.
Remarkable and interesting on the French speaking side is a yearly organized round table with three stakeholders: education of engineering, professional member organi- zations and employers of engineers. The idea of CIBIC is to strengthen this effort and to try and achieve this as a rst step in the Flemish community, and later on for the Belgian national level - a goal that meets some complexity to achieve. On the Flemish side, the two groups (ir. and Ing.), have a clearly different culture, partly based on the different pro les in their education and based on a long history of separate organizations. This implies a consid- erable effort for the realization the ambitious plan of bringing together the stakeholders. The need for the two different pro les, the one more focused on practical and applied education (Ing.), the other on more abstract and