Intellectual Property:

As an engineer, you have an obligation to protect your employer’s or client’s proprietary information. Often you will be expected to sign a confidentiality agreement, especially if you are allowed into a manufacturing facility. This can result in an ethical balancing act if you find yourself in competitors’ facilities.

For example, an engineer who designs and sells fluid handling systems might visit competing customers’ facilities. The engineer owes each client the best professional advice in the selection of appropriate equipment, without divulging how competitors run their facilities.

The issue of how to manage information from former employers can be particularly challenging. In the course of your professional activities, you learn information that is a mix of both private intellectual property and general knowledge. If you’ve left one employer to work for another employer in the same kind of business, there is likely to be information that you learned in your previous job that is relevant to your current employer. While you may always use broadly-applicable professional information, it is unethical to reveal your previous employer’s proprietary and trade secrets. For an in-depth discussion of Intellectual Property, please visit the PPC modules “Introduction to Intellectual Property” and “Patent Law.”