STOKING THE FLAME

Despite fledgling efforts to promote the profession, fire protection engineering remains a little-known discipline among young people pursuing technical careers—even as demand for FPEs has never been greater. What does that gap mean for the safety community, and how can the industry and educators attract a new generation of practitioners?

In late August, Ann Aquino arrived on the leafy green campus of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts, eager to begin her two-year master’s degree program in fire protection engineering. She started receiving job inquiries just a few weeks into her first semester.

“I’ve already had at least one firm reach out to ask me when my degree will be completed,” chuckled Aquino, 22, who earned her bachelor’s in architectural engineering from WPI last spring. Her LinkedIn page is also starting to fill up with unsolicited inquires. “I was actually expecting that,” she said about the early interest, “but it’s still comforting because I know people in other fields who are trying really hard to find a job and are having trouble.”

If one values job security, there might be no better time than the present to become a fire protection engineer (FPE). For at least a decade, fire protection engineering firms around the world have struggled to find enough qualified people to help them tackle the growing number of projects that require fire and life safety design and oversight. Precise figures on FPE supply and demand do not exist, but experts offer an array of anecdotal evidence suggesting the gap continues to grow.

“Probably the most common conversation I’ve had over the past decade on the Society of Fire Protection Engineers board is about this gap that we have in the profession and how it’s getting worse,” said Amanda Kimball, the current SFPE board president and executive director of the Fire Protection Research Foundation. “This isn’t a new problem, but it’s been building, because there’s more need for fire protection engineers than ever.”

A convergence of global factors, including wider global code adoption, a once-in-a-generation building boom, accelerating adoption of new technologies, and mounting threats posed by intensifying natural disasters, has created a surge in demand for FPE services, experts say. Each of these trends has introduced a range of new risks and emergent hazards that have made the job of protecting the built environment more challenging than ever (see “A World of Demand,” next spread).

Despite the growing demand for FPEs, the numbers continue to go in the wrong direction as the industry’s workforce ages and not enough young workers emerge to replace them. In a 2015 survey conducted by SFPE, an alarming 25 percent of FPEs said they were planning to retire within the next 10 years. No follow-up survey has been conducted this year to see if that prediction came to fruition, but the trend suggests that the profession will continue to lose a significant number of workers in the near future.

On the other side of the equation, “the number of engineers graduating from accredited fire protection engineering programs isn’t keeping pace with the growing demand,” said Raj Arora, CEO of Jensen Hughes, one of the world’s largest fire protection engineering consulting firms. “Attracting and developing the right professionals is one of, if not the most, critical challenges our industry faces today.”

An industry trends survey conducted by NFPA last year found that the lack of qualified people is a problem across the safety world. Exactly half of the 358 skilled tradespeople surveyed from fields such as engineering said that a shortage of qualified candidates was the top challenge they would face in 2025. Nearly 40 percent said that their organization’s budget would be focused on increased hiring to add or replace positions.

If the shortage of fire protection engineers persists or gets worse, the economic and life safety ramifications could be profound. For starters, too few FPEs could lead to slower design and review processes, adding considerable time and expense to building projects. Worse, it could mean that engineers from other disciplines will be increasingly forced to fill key roles that they are not qualified for, a situation that could lead to catastrophic oversights.

The Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people in West London in 2017, is the example many safety experts point to as a cautionary tale of what can happen when unqualified people are put in charge of fire safety. An exhaustive government inquiry following the Grenfell fire found that safety regulators in the United Kingdom had approved renovation plans that called for covering the unsprinklered residential tower with a highly combustible decorative façade just a year before the fire. That choice was identified as the primary cause of the fire’s rapid spread up the sides of the building.

“Who in their right mind would entirely cover a building with non-fire-retarded polyethylene, which is a material that has the same heat of combustion as petrol but also melts and drips all over the place?” asked Jose Torero, a world-renowned fire protection engineer and key witness in the UK government's inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire, on a recent episode of the NFPA Podcast that examined the lessons from Grenfell. These are the types of critical errors that arise when a safety system lacks qualified workers, he said.

“The people who were in charge of delivering fire safety within [the U.K.] government didn’t have the competencies to be able to operate in a performance-based system,” Torero said. “And the result was bad decision after bad decision after bad decision that, after 40 years, accumulated into such an extraordinary number of bad decisions that in essence, what you got was a regime of regulation that was completely not suited for its purpose.”

It’s not hard to envision these types of errors multiplying in the future if there are fewer qualified FPEs available to do the work. That includes not only FPEs to draft and review designs, but also to conduct the fire research that underlies all safety codes and standards, said Bart Merci, a fire researcher at Ghent University in Belgium and the editor-in-chief of Fire Safety Journal.

“If we continue to face a shortage of fire protection engineers, the obvious consequence is that many more novel systems will be introduced into society where the fire risk is either poorly understood or ignored,” Merci said. “I’m afraid that if that happens, the consequences of fires will grow to a level that will become very difficult for the fire service to handle.”

AWARENESS ISSUE

Unlike widget makers, the safety industry cannot simply build more factories to increase the production of engineers—that production pipeline rests mostly in the hands of universities. However, the handful of schools that offer fire protection engineering degree programs in the U.S. and Europe generally run below capacity, despite outreach efforts, according to numerous professors and program directors interviewed for this story.

A convergence of global factors has created a surge in demand for FPE services, experts say, introducing a range of new risks and emergent hazards that make the job of protecting the built environment more challenging than ever.

A prestigious program called the International Master of Science in Fire Safety Engineering Consortium— where fire safety engineering students spend one semester at each of Europe’s four most prominent engineering universities—has only about 30 new students enrolled per year, according to Merci, the program’s director. The individual fire safety engineering programs that make up the consortium— Ghent University, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Lund University in Sweden, and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain—each have stable enrollment numbers, “but nowhere near enough for what is needed on the market,” Merci said. Ghent, where Merci is a professor, for instance, has only five to 10 new students enrolled per year. Realistically, the consortium master’s program could handle about 20 more students per year, and the Ghent program could easily accommodate at least three times more students than it currently enrolls, Merci said.

WPI, one of the most prominent fire protection engineering schools in the U.S., conveys diplomas to “anywhere from 25 to 40” FPE master’s students per year, said Milosh Puchovsky, the associate department head of WPI’s fire protection engineering program. “But I haven’t seen 40 in quite a few years. It’s probably more in the high 20s, low 30s range … I’d like to see us graduate more, and I think a lot of the engineering firms that hire them would like to see more as well.”

On the surface, it seems like an FPE career path would be an easy sell to prospective students. Unlike many new graduates today, finding a job is not an issue for new FPEs. “Practically all of our [FPE] graduates have a job lined up months before they graduate. They have different offers and then they pick whatever they think is most appealing to them,” Merci said. “It’s really like a battle for talent, I would say.”

Today’s fire protection engineers must increasingly operate without a script, using performance-based designs to achieve safety. “There’s no cookbook or recipe to follow,” one observer said. “FPEs are inventing the dish.”

That employer battle is reflected in FPE median salaries. According to SFPE surveys, fire protection engineers in the U.S. earned a median base salary of more than $130,000 per year in 2022, and the equivalent of about $90,000 in Europe. By comparison, civil engineers make a median of $95,000 in the U.S.; mechanical engineers have a median salary of about $99,000; and electrical engineers make a median of roughly $107,000, according to 2025 data compiled by U.S. News and World Report. FPE degrees also tend to pay off quickly. A worker with a master’s degree in fire protection engineering and less than five years of experience earns a median annual salary of about $103,000, SFPE surveys found. Those with a bachelor’s degree in FPE earn a median of about $82,000 per year during their first five years on the job.

With good pay, plentiful job prospects, and a mission that most would deem worthwhile, why aren’t more students entering the field? The answer, according to everyone interviewed for this story, is frustratingly simple: “I think it’s largely an awareness issue,” said Kimball, the SFPE board president. “It’s such a niche profession that it’s unlikely someone would come across it unless they happen to know somebody who’s a firefighter or a fire protection engineer.”

Even finding data and information about the profession online can be a challenge. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collects data and provides occupational projections for more than 800 occupations, doesn’t keep specific numbers for fire protection engineering. It does, however, collect data for many other types of engineering disciplines, including mechanical, electrical, civil, computer hardware, and biomedical.

Bill Koffel, a longtime fire protection engineer and a faculty member in the University of Maryland’s FPE program, said that fire protection “is still the unknown child in engineering. When you pick up any publication that talks about careers in engineering, it’s basically going to talk about electrical, mechanical, civil, structural, those more traditional fields of engineering.”

Perhaps the best illustration of this point is Aquino’s own experience—or lack thereof—with fire protection before arriving at WPI. In high school, she attended the Engineering Technology Academy at Doherty Memorial High in Worcester, Massachusetts, a program that, according to its website, is designed for high-achieving, technically oriented students who plan to pursue engineering degrees in college. At Doherty, Aquino did coursework in civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering, and even some coding and machine building. But as far as she could recall, none of her classwork ever had anything to do with fire. “I had no idea fire protection engineering was even a thing until my freshman year at WPI,” she said.

She first heard about the discipline when Puchovsky was invited to present during her introduction to architectural engineering class. “That presentation really piqued my interest, because once I started in architectural engineering, I realized I didn’t like the design aspect as much, but I really liked working with the code,” she said. She later told one of her engineering friends about the field—they hadn’t heard of it, either—and now they are both enrolled in WPI’s FPE master’s program. Aquino’s experience demonstrates, at least anecdotally, that when students know FPE exists as a career option, it is often an appealing one.

Like his colleagues, Puchovsky isn’t surprised when engineering undergrad students at WPI have never heard of his discipline. “For most, fire just doesn’t really enter the picture for them until they get here,” he said.

Matt Biando, another first-year FPE master’s degree student at WPI, exemplifies the other common path that students take to find the program. “My dad came to WPI to get his master’s in fire protection and then worked for Jensen Hughes for a while before starting his own fire protection engineering company,” said Biando, who grew up working with his father and has already attended several NFPA conferences. His older brother also attended WPI’s fire protection engineering master’s program.

Like Aquino, Biando has become a successful ambassador of sorts at WPI for the niche field. “I told one of my neighbors in my freshman-year dorm, ‘Hey, you should stay for a master’s and do it in fire protection engineering,’” Biando recalled during a phone interview from campus. “He was like, ‘What’s that?’ Now he’s actually here sitting next to me and we’re doing the master’s program together, which is awesome.”

Despite those success stories, FPE’s public relations problem is a familiar one across all the big engineering schools. At the University of Maryland, for instance, the mechanical engineering program typically enrolls more than 1,200 undergraduates, compared to fewer than 80 in the FPE program. “In fact, the mechanical engineering department at the University of Maryland this fall has the highest enrollment it’s ever had,” Koffel said, somewhat wistfully. “The question is, how can we attract some of those students into fire protection engineering? That’s our biggest challenge.”

AI TO THE RESCUE?

There is no widespread mobilization underway to spread the gospel about the benefits of an FPE career, although a few notable efforts have emerged this year.

Since becoming SFPE board president last year, Kimball has helped spearhead a renewed effort at the organization to build awareness among younger people about the profession, with a social media campaign targeting high school and undergraduate students. “We’re working on getting videos from different people in the profession that show that fire protection engineering is a really wide and varied field and that there’s a lot of different and interesting things you could do that will have a big impact on making our built environment safer,” she said. The organization is also working on a range of promotional materials it hopes to distribute to SFPE chapter members across the U.S. for use at school and job fairs.

Meanwhile, this fall, the University of Maryland launched a new online undergraduate degree program in fire protection engineering. The school’s directors approved the program with the objective of growing the field by offering new opportunities for more students around the world to attend Maryland’s prestigious FPE program.

Maryland’s inaugural online FPE class has enrolled just seven students, all from North America, but the university is aggressively trying to market the program to international students, said Koffel, who is the online program’s director. “We have reached out to potential students on every continent except Antarctica,” he said. Over the next five years, Koffel said, the goal is to gradually increase the size of Maryland’s online FPE undergraduate program so that it is as large as its traditional on-campus program, effectively doubling the number of FPE students graduating from the university each year.

While these are encouraging first steps, most industry observers acknowledge that more needs to be done, or at least considered. Few of the researchers, professors, and industry professionals interviewed for this story could point to broader or coordinated efforts underway that are designed to address the challenge of attracting more students into FPE programs. While schools acknowledge that they have room for more students and employers maintain they need more workers, there’s little coordination between academic institutions or between schools and industry, beyond the typical career fairs or work-training programs. There also does not seem to be any meaningful research happening, at least publicly, to better understand or project the industry’s future labor needs and how many more graduates will be required to meet those needs.

“For the most part, the schools are all trying to recruit students within their own spheres. It’s all kind of regionalized and localized, and some of that’s OK, but I think at some point, we really need to work together to have more of an impact,” Kimball said.

Aside from reaching out to younger people, Kimball thinks that more could be done to attract more women and minority groups into the field. At present, only 14 percent of fire protection engineers are women, according to SFPE. “If only one sector of the population is going toward these jobs, then you’re just going to have fewer people, right?” said Kimball, who recently co-authored an article for the Society of Women Engineers espousing the benefits of an FPE career. “And that is true across the engineering disciplines. I think it also speaks to the fact that engineering societies need to start working together to increase that diversity, otherwise the pipeline isn’t going to get any bigger.”

While efforts to increase awareness of FPE are appreciated, nobody is under the illusion that a better marketing campaign will magically fix the FPE shortage. There is, however, a growing view that perhaps the best and only way to fix the FPE supply issue is to increase productivity by using artificial intelligence—ironically, the same industry that’s driving so much of the growth in fire protection demand right now. Many of the people interviewed for this story are bullish on AI, especially in applications related to project design and review.

“I don’t think we’re going to completely solve the labor supply problem, but I believe technology will ease some of the burden,” Arora said. “There’s a lot of fear around AI, but if implemented and used strategically, it can be a tremendous asset—helping us meet industry demand while keeping the most critical work in the hands of qualified professionals.”

Many predict that AI tools will soon help boost productivity and efficiency across the entire NFPA Fire & Life Safety Ecosystem™, from the FPEs who design plans to the fire marshals who review them. For example, rather than start from scratch every time, designers may eventually use AI automation tools to perform perhaps the first 80 percent of a plan—consisting primarily of the routine but time-consuming design work—then use their human expertise on the finishing touches. Professional code consultants could use AI tools to find more accurate answers faster. Stacking those time savings across the many jobs and processes involved in the fire protection universe could result in fewer people being able to achieve much more with potentially better results, advocates believe, helping to alleviate the FPE labor shortage issue.

An industry survey conducted by NFPA at its 2025 conference found that the safety community is especially optimistic about the impact AI will have in their fields. An overwhelming majority (95 percent) of respondents believe that AI has a purpose in dayto- day job functions in the skilled trades, and about a third said the technology would help streamline tasks amid ongoing labor shortages.

Schools say they have room for more students and employers maintain they need more workers, but there's little coordination among those stakeholders to address the problem.

However, many questions remain about giving AI a prominent role in a field that comes down to life and death. There are also many things that AI can’t do yet and maybe shouldn’t in the future, some argue. At a minimum, safety experts agree that there will always be a critical need to ensure that future FPEs understand the foundational fire protection principles well enough to question and double-check the results produced using AI, and to understand why it makes the choices it does. A fallible AI overseen by an apathetic or unquestioning human is hardly an improvement over the process that resulted in Grenfell.

“AI might be an input into your process, but in the end, it’s still your decision as the engineer, and students need to understand that,” said Puchovsky, who, like many FPE professors, is still grappling with how best to incorporate AI and AI literacy into the curriculum. “You’re getting hired to think and to give your recommendation about something, and how to get there.”

Many professors agree that courses around AI literacy and ethics will likely become staples in FPE programs at some point in the not-too-distant future. “We need to educate the engineers on how to properly use artificial intelligence and how to properly vet the information that we’re getting through artificial intelligence,” Koffel said.

Of course, nobody knows if or how soon this new paradigm will exist, or what impact it will have on the industry. Arora estimates it will take at least five years for AI technologies to mature enough to have a meaningful impact on the labor shortage issues that firms like his are facing. Until then, the next few years will likely be “the toughest,” he said.

Many predict that AI tools will soon help boost productivity and ef_iciency across the safety ecosystem and may help alleviate issues around the FPE labor shortage.

While AI isn’t yet a significant part of day-to-day engineering work, some companies have turned to AI to increase efficiency in other ways. For instance, over the past year, Jensen Hughes has developed and deployed an in-house AI tool that leverages the power of large language models and retrieval augmented generation. According to the company, the tool has streamlined proposal development and accelerated access to complex information, boosting consistency, productivity, and decision-making across Jensen Hughes. Company representatives say the impact has been particularly notable in the work Jensen Hughes does for the nuclear industry, where the AI tool helps consultants navigate regulatory complexity and synthesize vast amounts of data for more informed client guidance.

That efficiency is “creating capacity for us,” Arora said. “Every hour that we free up is another hour that our employees can focus on the projects that make the biggest impact.”

To help with the fire protection workload, consulting firms are also increasingly hiring engineering graduates from adjacent fields, such as chemical and mechanical engineering, and training them in fire protection concepts. Many firms have formed partnerships with accredited universities, and send their employees to those institutions to attend short but intensive certificate programs in fire protection topics. This tactic has become so common, in fact, that SFPE is developing resources to help employers train engineers from parallel professions in fire protection. .

“Recognizing that finding fire protection engineers to hire has become increasingly difficult, we’re trying to do what we can to help these firms fill the positions while also making sure that these employees have the proper training to do the job,” Kimball said..“Grenfell really shined a light on what happens when people are practicing fire protection engineering who are not qualified to do so, and that is also a critical message we are trying to make sure everyone understands.”