Maintaining Professional Certifications and Memberships

[jmechanical]

I'm a mechanical engineer and I have an professional engineering license, an ASME GD&T certification and a membership to ASME (which I just renewed). The certification/license were once a point of professional pride, but starting to wonder if they're worth maintaining.

The PE license is not necessary in my field (consumer products) and I don't even have it on my business cards or e-mail signatures. If anything most people in consumer products seem to resent it and think you are snob. Most factories that manufacture consumer products don't pay attention to +/- tolerances, let alone GD&T. In my experience consumer products are way different than aerospace and automotive in this regard. We always just modify the mass production tools/molds until the product functions. The ASME membership is a little valuable in that I occasionally look up things on AccessEngineering, but doubt it would help me land another job and I'd probably be able to find as good an answer by google or just calling people in my network.

Currently these things cost me about

PE License PDHs: $75/year
PE License Renewal Fee: $75/year
GDTP-S Cert: $150/3 years
ASME Membership Dues: $200/year

Which works out to about $400/year, which is about 0.5% of my gross income, but still, that's 0.5% that I could bump my savings rate up by.

Anyone here get any certifications and then not bother to maintain them? Do you regret it? Do you still put them on a resume and just say (expired)? Would hiring managers look down on that?

I do plan on bringing it up to my manager and wondering if my company would pay for these things, but with COVID and recent salary cuts, I don't have high hopes.

[MudPuppy]

If they’re expired I don’t list them on my resume. Obviously I have to maintain my professional license in order to practice, and that costs me 100 every two years. My ACLS is paid for my my employer, but it’s a condition of employment, so I wouldn’t be able to let it lapse. I had one particular board certification that I let lapse when I started working in a different specialty. I regret that because I moved back into the old specialty.

[rothwem]

What is involved in getting the PE cert back if you let it expire? Do you have to take the test again?  I never got my PE and regret it and it severely impacted my income in my last job. I’m back in automotive where it doesn’t matter, but in power generation where I was before, you’ve got to have the PE to anywhere above an entry level engineer.

GDT cert seems like a waste, tbh. I would hope that any mechanical engineer I hired would know GDT, though it’s probably not universally true.