Ethics and professional conduct
Ethics and professional conduct
This domain tests how engineers resolve competing duties: public safety, client loyalty, employer expectations, honesty and fairness. Expect scenario questions where the correct action is clear but commercially inconvenient.
Core rules
- The safety, health and welfare of the public come first. If a design or instruction is unsafe, raise it promptly and in writing.
- Be honest about competence, data, progress and uncertainty. Do not misrepresent qualifications, test results or the extent of your review.
- Disclose and manage conflicts of interest. A gift, hospitality or outside interest that could influence judgment must be declared and, where necessary, declined.
- Keep client and employer information confidential, but do not use confidentiality to conceal danger or illegality.
- Compete fairly, pay fair remuneration, respect intellectual property and credit others’ work.
- Report unethical or unsafe conduct through the proper channel; keep records of the concern and the response.
Worked example
A supplier offers you a fully paid trip shortly before you write a specification that will favour one product. Reasoning: the trip creates an apparent conflict. You decline or, if already accepted, disclose it to your employer and remove yourself from the specification decision. You specify by performance criteria and document the evaluation. The test is not whether you feel influenced, but whether a reasonable observer would see a conflict.
Traps
Calling a gift “just hospitality”; staying silent about a conflict; breaching confidentiality unnecessarily; signing work you did not supervise; and retaliating against a whistleblower.