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By rdnewsNOW Staff

BARRY CAVANAUGH

ASET CEO leaving a legacy as he retires from role

Dec 30, 2024 | 10:10 AM

Barry Cavanaugh, industry-changing CEO of the Association of Science and Engineering Technology Professionals of Alberta (ASET), has announced he is retiring from the position effective as of the end of December.

The engineering technology profession spans 21 disciplines and more than 120 occupations across a variety of industries, and Red Deer is home to almost 300 ASET members, according to officials.

Cavanaugh served as the association’s leader and general counsel for 17 years and in that time, was a driving force behind initiatives that have reinvigorated the profession and set national precedents, but also made its invaluable but often overlooked function more visible to Albertans, his colleagues reflect.

Prior to his arrival at ASET, Cavanaugh advocated and paved the way for Alberta to become the first province to give pharmacists the legal authority to prescribe some medications and administer drugs by injection. This work was accomplished while he served as founding CEO of the Alberta Pharmacists’ Association (RxA).

Once he joined ASET, officials point out, he helped transform it from a society (as it had been since it was established in 1963)to a statutory professional regulatory body, which was proclaimed in law in 2009. As a result of that work, ASET now regulates the province’s engineering technology sector, officials say.

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In 2010, Cavanaugh played a critical role in establishing the Technology Professionals Canada (TPC), an alliance of technology professional associations across Canada.

In 2014, he was also instrumental in developing Technology Accreditation Canada (TAC), an accreditation model for technology professionals across the country that has since accredited numerous technical college/polytechnic engineering technology programs.

In the same timeframe, under his leadership, officials note Alberta became the first province to eliminate the Canadian work experience requirement for international engineering technology professionals; other provinces have since followed suit.

Shortly after in 2016, Cavanaugh mandated the launch of the competency-based assessment program, which offers internationally trained and other engineering technology professionals a faster route to earning ASET designations and establishing careers. Engineered by Cavanaugh and the first of its kind in Canada, the program enables them to find their footing in their career fields without having to return to school full-time. These standards have been established as the national competencies’ standards of all the engineering technology regulators in Canada.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he introduced a new ASET policy that waived the application fees for refugees seeking to become members and attain their designations. These fees, which include an application fee, prior learning assessment and recognition fee, ASET professional practice exam fee and certification exam fee, can cost up to $1,000 per member over time.

“We realized that there may be engineers, technologists and technicians coming to Alberta as refugees – from Ukraine, Sudan, and other suffering nations – and saw that we should not put unnecessary burdens on them in seeking to find work for which they were qualified,” said Cavanaugh. “We thought the least we could do was to waive the application fees. That policy is still in effect because there are still refugees.”

Until his official departure, Cavanaugh intends to continue to advocate to the Government of Alberta to amend the Engineering and Geoscience Professions Act (EGPA) to include a definition of technologist practice, coupled with a section exempting certified engineering technologists operating within that definition from the exclusive scope of the P.Eng.