Absence of Prior NSPE Board of Ethical Review Decisions on Code Section 3(e)
In the absence of any previous decisions on this section of the code, however, and under the circumstances stated, we are inclined to the more charitable view that his action can be condoned as something less than an 'exaggeration'
NSPE Board of Ethical Review as a contextual factor in first-impression interpretation
The Board explicitly notes the absence of any prior BER decisions interpreting Section 3(e), which informs its adoption of a more charitable interpretive posture toward Engineer Doe's conduct and its distinction between 'exaggeration' and 'emphasis'
N/A – noted as non-existent at time of case
Accept Position Under Embellished Credentials
Aerospace Design Engineer, job applicant
Employer's hiring decision remained premised on an inflated understanding of his managerial experience
Ongoing professional relationship would be built on a foundation of misrepresentation
Risk of being unable to perform at the implied level of managerial experience
Obligation to seek and maintain employment within area of general technical competence
Reasonable confidence in ability to perform the role satisfactorily
Belief in own capability to perform the role adequately
Pragmatic resolution of extended unemployment
Professional survival and economic stability
Secure stable employment and re-enter the workforce in a role within his general technical field
Ability to perform at a level consistent with the role's actual requirements
Managerial and administrative competence in technical engineering context
Self-awareness of gap between represented and actual experience
After successfully obtaining a new job offer resulting from the revised resume
NSPE Code Section 3(e) as applied to the completed act of obtaining employment through embellished statements
Obligation not to perpetuate a deception initiated during the application process
Ongoing duty of candor to employer upon entering professional relationship
Having obtained a job offer as a direct result of the embellished resume, Doe chose to accept the new position, which involved responsibilities in his general field of technical expertise but at a managerial and administrative level he had represented as more experienced than he was.
Accept Position Under Embellished Credentials (Action 3) → Ethics Board Ruling Issued (Event 5)
Having obtained a job offer as a direct result of the embellished resume, Doe chose to accept the new position, which ultimately came to the attention of the NSPE Ethics Board, which retrospectively analyzed the case and concluded that John Doe's resume modifications constituted an ethical violation
Accept Position Under Embellished Credentials (Action 3)
Without acceptance of the position, no ongoing professional misrepresentation would have existed to adjudicate; the ruling required both the act of embellishment and its operationalization through employment acceptance
Acceptance of employment obtained through misrepresentation
Case coming to the attention of the Ethics Board through complaint or referral
Doe's status as a professional engineer subject to NSPE ethical jurisdiction
NSPE Code provisions addressing honesty and misrepresentation in professional conduct
John Doe (primary conduct); NSPE Ethics Board (interpretive decision)
Acceptance of position + professional engineer status + case referral to Ethics Board + applicable code provisions was sufficient to produce a formal ethics ruling
Aerospace Company Resume-Deceived Prospective Engineering Employer
{'industry': 'Aerospace', 'hiring_basis': 'Resume representation of managerial and administrative experience', 'harm_type': 'Potential mismatch between represented and actual qualifications for management role'}
The aerospace company that hired John Doe based on a resume that materially misrepresented the balance of his managerial versus technical experience, bearing a legitimate interest in accurate self-representation by applicants so that engineering management responsibilities are entrusted only to those genuinely qualified.
{'type': 'employer_of', 'target': 'John Doe Resume Misrepresenting Job-Seeking Engineer'}
Resume-Deceived Prospective Engineering Employer
he was able to obtain a new job which involved responsibilities in his general field of technical expertise
Aerospace Employer Resume Verification Inquiry
Prospective Employer Resume Verification Inquiry Capability
The aerospace company that hired Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to recognize ambiguity in Doe's qualification statements about his managerial experience and to pursue targeted clarifying inquiries to verify the actual balance of his technical versus managerial career history
The aerospace employer hired Doe for a position involving managerial responsibilities based on a resume that had been deliberately restructured to de-emphasize technical design experience
Hiring Doe based on a resume that misrepresented the balance of his experience without conducting verification inquiries that would have revealed the predominantly technical nature of his twelve-year career
As a result he was able to obtain a new job which involved responsibilities in his general field of technical expertise.
Aerospace Sector Prospective Engineering Employer
{'sector': 'Aerospace / engineering industry', 'interest': 'Accurate representation of applicant competence to avoid entrusting engineering decisions to unqualified persons', 'code_protection': 'Section 3(e) interpreted as protecting prospective employers from deception about engineer-applicant competence'}
The prospective employer(s) to whom Doe applied for employment, whose legitimate interest in accurate qualification disclosure is identified by the Board as the protective purpose of Section 3(e) — ensuring that important engineering decisions are not entrusted to unqualified applicants who have deceived the hiring authority.
{'type': 'evaluating_applicant', 'target': 'Doe Resume Misrepresenting Job-Seeking Engineer'}
the purpose of Section 3(e) is to protect a prospective employer from being deceived as to the competence of an engineer-applicant
in order that the employer not be tricked into entrusting important engineering decisions to one not qualified to make them
BER Employer Protection Teleological Reading Section 3e Doe
The BER articulated the teleological purpose of Section 3(e) as employer protection from competence deception, and used this purpose to calibrate the boundary between permissible emphasis and prohibited exaggeration in Doe's case
NSPE Board of Ethical Review; Engineer John Doe
Employer Qualification Deception Protection Teleological Constraint
The BER was constrained to interpret Section 3(e) by reference to its employer-protection purpose — protecting prospective employers from being deceived about engineer-applicant competence so that important engineering decisions are not entrusted to unqualified persons — and Doe was constrained to ensure his resume did not deceive the prospective employer about his actual competence for the managerial role; because Doe could truthfully show some degree of competence in the emphasized area, the employer-protection purpose was not violated.
NSPE Code of Ethics Section 3(e); BER Case No. 72-11
The purpose of Section 3(e), we prefer to believe, is to protect a prospective employer from being deceived as to the competence of an engineer-applicant in order that the employer not be tricked into entrusting important engineering decisions to one not qualified to make them.
At the time of resume submission and BER interpretation
In this case, however, Doe could truthfully show some degree of competence in the managerial and administrative technical area of the employment, even though he strongly emphasized its extent and level.
CausalLink_Accept Position Under Embellis
CausalLink_Ethics Board Interpretation De
Doe was not in violation of the code for rewriting his employment resume to emphasize his managerial and administrative experience and play down his technical experience in order to obtain new employment.
Beyond the Board's finding that Doe did not violate the code by reframing his resume, the ruling implicitly establishes a 'genuine underlying competence' condition as the operative ethical threshold that separates permissible emphasis from prohibited misrepresentation. The Board's tolerance of Doe's conduct rested not merely on the absence of literally false statements, but on the fact that Doe sincerely believed he could perform satisfactorily in the managerial role and that the role fell within his general domain of technical expertise. This condoning condition is analytically significant: it means the Board's ruling is not a blanket endorsement of strategic resume reframing, but rather a context-dependent judgment that collapses if the engineer lacks genuine competence for the role sought. Engineers who replicate Doe's emphasis strategy while seeking roles genuinely beyond their competence cannot rely on this ruling as ethical cover, because the competence prerequisite would be absent. The Board's reasoning therefore implicitly encodes a dual-element permissibility test — factual accuracy plus genuine competence — neither element of which alone is sufficient to render resume reframing ethically acceptable.
The Board's teleological narrowing of Code Section 3(e) — reading its prohibition on exaggerated qualification statements as primarily aimed at protecting employers from unqualified candidates — creates an analytically unstable duty loophole that the Board did not fully reckon with. By anchoring the provision's ethical force in its protective purpose toward employers rather than in a freestanding honesty norm, the Board implicitly permits deliberate impression management so long as the candidate is minimally competent. This conflicts with the broader Honesty in Professional Representations principle, which operates as a foundational obligation independent of any single code section's teleological scope. The tension is not merely theoretical: a deontological reading of the code would hold that Doe's intentional restructuring of his resume to create a false overall impression of his primary professional identity — even through factually accurate statements — constitutes a form of deliberate deception that the universalizability of honest credential representation cannot accommodate. The Board's purposive interpretation, while pragmatically defensible, does not dissolve this tension; it merely subordinates the honesty norm to the employer-protection rationale without acknowledging that the two can diverge. Future cases involving more extreme emphasis distortions will require the Board to articulate where the teleological reading ends and the freestanding honesty obligation begins.
The Board's ruling leaves unaddressed a significant post-hiring disclosure question that its own reasoning implicitly raises: if Doe's resume reframing was permissible at the application stage because it did not cross into prohibited exaggeration, the Board's analysis does not resolve whether Doe acquired an affirmative obligation — once hired — to disclose the actual proportional balance of his technical versus managerial experience to his new employer, particularly as that employer made role assignments and resource decisions based on the impression created by his resume. The honesty norm in professional representations does not terminate at the moment of hire; it extends into the ongoing employment relationship. If the employer's operational decisions were materially shaped by a distorted understanding of Doe's background — an understanding Doe deliberately cultivated — then the ethical question of whether Doe had a continuing duty of corrective disclosure remains live even after the Board's finding of no violation at the resume stage. This gap in the ruling is especially consequential because the Board's own reasoning acknowledged that Doe's resume created an impression disproportionate to his actual experience, and that acknowledgment cannot be fully reconciled with silence on the downstream relational obligations that impression generated.
The Board's implicit mitigation of Doe's conduct in light of prolonged aerospace industry unemployment creates an internally inconsistent standard that simultaneously affirms the principle that economic hardship cannot excuse misrepresentation while allowing the severity of Doe's circumstances to soften the ethical judgment. This inconsistency is not merely rhetorical: if economic hardship is genuinely irrelevant to whether a code violation occurred, then the Board's extended discussion of Doe's unemployment situation and the structural conditions of the aerospace industry contraction serves no legitimate analytical function in the ruling. Conversely, if those circumstances did influence the Board's threshold determination — as the texture of the ruling suggests — then the Board has effectively created a contextually variable misrepresentation standard in which the same resume reframing conduct might constitute a violation under conditions of voluntary career transition but not under conditions of involuntary structural unemployment. This variability undermines the universality of the Pertinent Fact Misrepresentation Intent-and-Purpose Dual-Element Test and raises the further systemic question of whether the profession itself bears collective responsibility for creating ethical conditions — through advocacy, credentialing reform, or structural support — that do not force individual engineers into the false choice between honest self-representation and prolonged unemployment.
In response to Q101: Doe's subsequent performance in the managerial role does not retroactively transform his resume conduct into a more serious ethical violation than the Board's ruling recognized. Ethics determinations are made at the time of the conduct based on the information and intentions then present, not revised in light of later outcomes. However, poor performance would introduce a new and independent ethical concern — namely, whether Doe continued to hold a position for which he lacked genuine competence, potentially implicating obligations around professional honesty with his employer going forward. The Board's condoning condition of genuine underlying competence, which softened its judgment, would be prospectively undermined by demonstrated incompetence, but this would constitute a separate ethical failure rather than a retroactive aggravation of the resume conduct itself.
In response to Q102: The prospective employer does bear an independent obligation to conduct reasonable due diligence in verifying candidate qualifications, and the employer's failure to probe beyond the resume's framing does diminish — though it does not eliminate — the ethical weight of Doe's conduct. The employer's independent verification capability is a structural safeguard in the hiring process, and its absence shifts some moral responsibility to the employer. Nevertheless, this shared responsibility framework does not absolve Doe, because the engineer's duty of honest representation exists independently of whether deception is likely to be detected. The existence of the employer's verification obligation functions as a mitigating contextual factor in assessing the severity of Doe's conduct, not as a defense that negates the ethical concern entirely.
In response to Q103: The Board's analysis correctly focuses on individual conduct, but the systemic dimension of the aerospace industry contraction raises a legitimate question the Board did not address — namely, whether the profession itself bears a collective obligation to develop ethical guidance and structural supports for engineers facing structural unemployment. When industry-wide layoffs force thousands of engineers into career transitions simultaneously, the burden of honest self-representation falls disproportionately on individuals navigating a market that has no established norms for cross-functional credential presentation. The profession's failure to provide such norms creates conditions in which individual engineers like Doe face a choice between ethical compromise and prolonged unemployment. This systemic gap does not excuse individual misrepresentation, but it does suggest that the NSPE and related professional bodies have an affirmative obligation to develop guidance on ethical career transition practices, rather than leaving engineers to resolve the tension between honesty and economic survival without institutional support.
In response to Q104: The Board's ruling that Doe's resume did not constitute a violation leaves unaddressed a distinct and important question — whether Doe acquired an affirmative disclosure obligation once hired. Once employed in a managerial role obtained through a resume that systematically downplayed his technical background and elevated minor administrative duties, Doe's employer was operating under a materially incomplete understanding of his professional profile. The honesty principle in professional representations does not terminate at the point of hire; it extends into the employment relationship. If Doe's actual competence gaps became relevant to his performance, or if his employer made resource allocation or project assignment decisions based on the impression created by his resume, Doe would have an obligation to correct that impression proactively. The Board's silence on this post-hire dimension represents a significant gap in the ruling's practical guidance.
In response to Q201: A genuine tension exists between the Contextual Resume Emphasis Permissibility Principle and the Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition. The Board resolved this tension by treating Doe's conduct as falling within permissible emphasis, analogizing it to accepted sales techniques. However, this resolution is analytically unstable. The Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition is specifically designed to capture cases where no individual statement is false but the overall impression created is deceptive — which is precisely the structure of Doe's resume. The Board's reliance on the sales analogy effectively subordinates the misleading-impression prohibition to the emphasis-permissibility principle without adequately explaining why the former does not govern. A more rigorous analysis would require the Board to articulate a principled threshold distinguishing permissible favorable framing from impermissible impression engineering, rather than treating the absence of literal falsehood as dispositive.
In response to Q202: The Board's application of the Deliberate Untruth Threshold reveals an important ambiguity in how intentionality interacts with the definition of misrepresentation. Doe's conduct was unambiguously intentional and strategic — he devised a new resume specifically to create a different impression — yet the Board found no violation because no statement was literally false. This outcome implies that intentionality alone does not satisfy the deliberate untruth threshold absent fabrication, which creates a troubling asymmetry: an engineer who accidentally includes a misleading statement through carelessness might be held to a higher standard than one who deliberately engineers a false overall impression through careful selection of true facts. A more coherent standard would hold that deliberate structuring of true statements to produce a known false impression satisfies the intentional deception element of the misrepresentation test, because the intent to deceive is present even if the mechanism is omission and framing rather than fabrication.
In response to Q203: The Board's teleological narrowing of Code Section 3(e) — reading it as primarily designed to protect employers from unqualified candidates — does create a structural tension with the Honesty in Professional Representations principle, which operates as a foundational obligation not bounded by the protective purpose of any single code section. By limiting Section 3(e)'s reach to cases where the candidate lacks genuine competence, the Board effectively converts a honesty norm into a competence-screening norm, which is a category error. The honesty principle does not require harm to a specific protected party as a precondition for its application; it applies to all professional representations regardless of whether the recipient is ultimately harmed. The Board's teleological reading, while pragmatically defensible, inadvertently subordinates a broad deontological obligation to a narrower consequentialist purpose, and this subordination is not adequately justified in the ruling.
In response to Q204: The Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Acknowledged But Contextually Mitigated principle does create an internally inconsistent standard in the Board's analysis. The Board explicitly acknowledges that economic hardship cannot excuse misrepresentation, yet the severity of Doe's unemployment circumstances — prolonged joblessness following an industry-wide contraction — visibly softens the Board's ethical judgment and contributes to its finding of no violation. This creates a de facto mitigation that the Board's own stated principle disavows. The inconsistency undermines the universality of the Pertinent Fact Misrepresentation Intent-and-Purpose Dual-Element Test, because it implies that the same conduct might be evaluated differently depending on the economic circumstances of the actor. A more internally consistent ruling would either apply the dual-element test uniformly and find a violation while acknowledging hardship as a mitigating factor in any sanction, or explicitly revise the principle to acknowledge that extreme structural unemployment constitutes a recognized contextual modifier — but it cannot coherently do both simultaneously while denying that it is doing so.
In response to Q301: From a deontological perspective, Doe did violate a categorical duty of honest representation, even though the Board found no code violation. Kant's universalizability test is instructive: if every engineer facing unemployment were permitted to restructure their resume to create a systematically misleading impression of their primary professional identity, the institution of the resume as a reliable credential signal would collapse, defeating the very purpose the practice is meant to serve. Doe's conduct cannot be universalized without self-contradiction. Furthermore, the deontological duty of honesty applies to the impression created, not merely to the literal truth of individual statements — treating the recipient as an end requires giving them an accurate basis for decision-making, which Doe's deliberately reframed resume denied. The Board's finding of no violation is defensible on consequentialist grounds but is in tension with a rigorous deontological analysis.
In response to Q302: From a consequentialist perspective, the Board's implicit reasoning — that Doe's employment in a role he could perform satisfactorily produced a net positive outcome — is plausible but incomplete. The analysis must account for three categories of harm the Board did not weigh: first, the competitive harm to other engineers who honestly represented their qualifications and were disadvantaged relative to Doe's strategically reframed presentation; second, the systemic erosion of employer trust in engineering resumes if the practice becomes normalized; and third, the precedent-setting effect of a professional ethics board condoning deliberate impression management under economic pressure. When these diffuse but real harms are included in the consequentialist calculus, the net outcome is considerably less clearly positive than the Board's analysis suggests. A full consequentialist assessment would likely find the ruling's permissiveness problematic, even if the immediate outcome for Doe was beneficial.
In response to Q303: From a virtue ethics perspective, Doe's conduct reveals a willingness to compromise the virtue of professional honesty when personal circumstances made honesty costly. A person of genuinely good professional character would have found a way to present their qualifications favorably without deliberately creating a false impression of their primary professional identity — for example, by framing their technical expertise as a foundation for managerial effectiveness, or by proactively addressing the experience gap in interviews. The fact that Doe instead chose to systematically downplay twelve years of dominant technical experience and elevate minor administrative duties as important responsibilities suggests that his commitment to honesty was conditional on its convenience. Economic hardship is a genuine test of character, not an excuse for its absence. The virtue ethics analysis therefore reaches a more critical conclusion than the Board's ruling, finding that Doe's conduct, while understandable, was not consistent with the professional integrity expected of an engineer of good character.
In response to Q401: Had Doe proactively disclosed during interviews that his managerial experience was limited but that he was confident in his ability to grow into the role, he would have achieved two important ethical outcomes simultaneously: he would have given prospective employers an accurate basis for their hiring decision, and he would have demonstrated the professional integrity that the honesty principle requires. Whether this approach would have been more likely to secure employment is an empirical question the record does not answer, but it is plausible that some employers would have valued the candor and the demonstrated self-awareness. More importantly for the Board's analysis, this alternative approach would have entirely eliminated the ethical concern, because the employer's consent to hire would have been informed rather than manipulated. The Board's analysis would almost certainly have been different — and unambiguously favorable to Doe — had he pursued this path, which suggests that the ethical problem was not the career transition itself but the method chosen to accomplish it.
In response to Q402: If Doe had accepted the position and subsequently demonstrated clear incompetence in the managerial role, the Board's finding of no violation would face serious analytical pressure, though it would not be formally overturned as a matter of retrospective adjudication. The Board's condoning condition — that Doe genuinely believed he could perform satisfactorily and that this belief was reasonable — would be falsified by demonstrated incompetence, revealing that the belief was either unreasonable at the time or that the resume misrepresentation caused the employer to forgo candidates who were actually competent. This would not retroactively establish a code violation for the resume conduct, but it would establish an independent and ongoing violation of the competence obligations that apply once Doe was in the role. More broadly, the counterfactual illustrates that the Board's no-violation finding was implicitly contingent on Doe's competence being genuine — a contingency the Board acknowledged but did not make explicit as a limiting condition of its ruling.
In response to Q403: The comparison between Doe's actual conduct and the hypothetical of fabricating entirely fictitious managerial projects is analytically illuminating but ultimately reveals that the distinction the Board drew is less robust than the ruling implies. The difference between reframing genuinely minor experience as important responsibility and fabricating fictitious experience is one of degree rather than kind — both involve creating a false impression of the candidate's managerial qualifications, and both are intentional. The Board's emphasis-versus-exaggeration threshold depends on the presence of some real underlying experience, but when that experience is characterized as minor and is then presented as an important responsibility, the characterization itself crosses into exaggeration. The comparison with outright fabrication does not vindicate Doe's conduct; it merely establishes that his conduct was less egregious than the worst case. The Board's ruling would have been more defensible had it acknowledged that Doe's conduct was on a continuum with fabrication rather than categorically different from it.
In response to Q404: If Doe had been seeking a position in an entirely unrelated field — one where his twelve years of aerospace engineering design experience provided no relevant foundation — the Board's condoning condition of genuine underlying competence would have been absent, and the outcome of the ruling would almost certainly have been different. The Board's no-violation finding rested critically on the fact that the new position involved responsibilities in Doe's general field of technical expertise, making his self-assessment of competence at least plausible. Without that connection, the resume reframing would have constituted not merely an impression management problem but a straightforward misrepresentation of qualification for a role the candidate had no reasonable basis to believe he could perform. This counterfactual clarifies that the Board's ruling was implicitly domain-specific and competence-contingent, and that its permissive conclusion should not be read as a general endorsement of resume reframing across career transitions into unrelated fields.
The central tension in this case — between the Honesty in Professional Representations principle and the Contextual Resume Emphasis Permissibility principle — was resolved not by subordinating honesty to self-interest, but by drawing a definitional boundary around what 'misrepresentation' requires. The Board effectively held that the Honesty principle is not violated by selective emphasis alone, because honesty operates against a standard of deliberate untruth rather than a standard of maximally balanced disclosure. The Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition was acknowledged but not applied, because the Board's teleological reading of Code Section 3(e) — oriented toward protecting employers from unqualified candidates — provided an off-ramp: since Doe genuinely believed himself competent to perform the managerial role, the protective purpose of the provision was not triggered. The resolution thus depended on collapsing the distinction between 'misleading' and 'false' into a single threshold of deliberate fabrication, which allowed the Contextual Resume Emphasis Permissibility principle to absorb conduct that the Implication-as-Misrepresentation principle would otherwise condemn. The case teaches that when honesty principles are operationalized through code provisions with specific protective purposes, the teleological scope of those provisions can quietly narrow the reach of the broader honesty norm — a narrowing that may not be visible unless the foundational principle is evaluated independently of the specific provision.
The Pertinent Fact Misrepresentation Intent-and-Purpose Dual-Element Test was applied in a way that reveals an internal tension with the Intentional Deception Versus Inadvertent Inaccuracy Distinction. The Board acknowledged that Doe's conduct was deliberate and strategic — satisfying the intent element — but declined to find a violation because the purpose element was not met in the sense that Doe was not representing himself as qualified for something he could not perform. This resolution is analytically coherent but creates a troubling asymmetry: the intent element, which is fully satisfied, is effectively neutralized by the purpose element, which is assessed not from the employer's perspective (who was misled about the balance of Doe's experience) but from Doe's own self-assessment of competence. The Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Acknowledged But Contextually Mitigated principle compounds this asymmetry — the Board formally affirmed that economic hardship cannot excuse misrepresentation, yet the severity of Doe's prolonged unemployment visibly softened the ethical judgment by making his self-assessed competence appear more credible and his strategic reframing appear more sympathetic. The case teaches that dual-element misrepresentation tests are vulnerable to collapse when one element is evaluated from the perspective of the actor rather than the recipient, and that economic hardship, while formally excluded as an excuse, can function as an implicit mitigating factor that shifts the burden of the purpose-element assessment in the actor's favor.
The interaction between the Resume Selective Emphasis Misrepresentation principle and the Genuine Competence Prerequisite constraint reveals that the Board implicitly established a condoning condition: selective emphasis that creates a misleading overall impression is permissible only when the engineer genuinely possesses the underlying competence to perform the role sought. This condoning condition does significant ethical work that the Board did not fully articulate. It means that the permissibility of Doe's conduct was not intrinsic to the act of reframing his resume, but was contingent on a factual predicate — his actual competence — that neither the employer nor the Board could independently verify at the time of the ruling. This creates a prospective ethical instability: the same resume strategy would be a violation if Doe later proved incompetent, yet the Board's ruling was issued without that information. The Third-Party Career Advisor Non-Absolution principle reinforces this instability, because the employment counselor's advice, while not exculpatory, was the proximate cause of the strategy — meaning the ethical burden remained entirely on Doe's self-assessment. Taken together, these principles teach that when ethical permissibility is conditioned on the actor's self-assessed competence, the profession is effectively delegating the enforcement of its honesty norms to the very party whose honesty is in question, which is a structurally weak basis for a professional ethics standard.
If discovered, reputational and professional licensure consequences
Potential violation of professional ethics code
Prospective employers would form an inaccurate impression of his managerial experience level
Risk of being placed in a role exceeding his actual managerial competence
Obligation to seek employment within his general field of technical expertise
Partial obligation to demonstrate genuine competence (he did possess some real managerial experience)
Pragmatic career self-preservation under economic duress
Sales and marketing norm of emphasizing positives
Overcome resume screening barriers by presenting managerial experience as more substantial than it actually was, thereby securing interviews and job offers
NSPE Code Section 3(e): prohibition against being listed for employment using exaggerated statements of qualifications
Accurate self-assessment of managerial competence level
Judgment about the boundary between permissible emphasis and prohibited exaggeration
Understanding of professional ethics obligations regarding credential representation
After repeated rejections for technical managerial or administrative positions
Obligation not to deceive parties who rely on professional credentials for safety-critical hiring decisions
Professional obligation of honest and accurate self-representation to prospective employers
After repeated rejections for managerial positions, Doe deliberately constructed a new resume that de-emphasized his twelve years of technical design experience and overstated the significance and level of his minor managerial and administrative responsibilities from prior employment.
Create Embellished Resume (Action 2) → New Position Secured (Event 4)
After repeated rejections for managerial positions, Doe deliberately constructed a new resume that distorted or overstated his credentials, and following the submission of this embellished resume, John Doe successfully secured a new position
Without the embellishment, Doe's prior accurate resume had already produced repeated rejections; the position would not have been secured on the basis of truthful credentials alone, making the embellishment causally decisive
Deliberate misrepresentation of credentials on resume
Embellished credentials meeting or exceeding employer screening thresholds
Employer reliance on resume accuracy in hiring decision
Embellished resume + employer's good-faith reliance on stated credentials + absence of independent verification was sufficient to produce a job offer
Should Doe restructure his resume to foreground his minor managerial experience and systematically de-emphasize his dominant twelve years of technical design work, or should he present his experience in a manner that accurately reflects the actual balance of his career?
After twelve years of technical design work and facing prolonged unemployment following aerospace industry layoffs, John Doe must decide how to structure his resume when pivoting toward management roles. His career history is dominated by technical design experience, with only minor managerial and administrative responsibilities. An employment counselor has advised him that management roles represent his best remaining opportunity. Doe must choose how to present his experience profile.
Deliberately restructure the resume to foreground minor managerial and administrative responsibilities, systematically downplay twelve years of dominant technical design experience, and present a professional identity that implies managerial competence as the primary career focus — following the employment counselor's advice without independent ethical evaluation.
Accurately represent the full career profile, disclosing both the twelve years of technical design work and the genuine but limited managerial responsibilities in their actual proportions, while framing the management experience positively and expressing genuine interest in transitioning to a management role.
Highlight real managerial and administrative experience prominently and favorably — leading with those qualifications and describing them in detail — without suppressing or obscuring the dominant technical design background, staying within the permissible zone of selective emphasis while preserving an accurate overall impression.
Licensed Professional Engineer Seeking Re-Employment
Should Doe accept the management position secured through his reframed resume without disclosing the actual proportion of his managerial versus technical experience, or should he proactively clarify the nature and extent of his managerial background before accepting?
Having revised his resume to emphasize managerial experience, Doe is offered a management position by an aerospace company whose hiring decision was based on the reframed resume. Doe must now decide whether to accept the position, knowing that his resume created an impression of managerial competence that significantly overstates the actual proportion of his managerial experience relative to his technical design background. The employer has not independently verified the depth of his managerial qualifications.
Accept the management role as offered, relying on the resume as submitted and making no proactive effort to clarify to the employer that managerial responsibilities constituted only a minor portion of his twelve-year career, allowing the employer's hiring decision to stand on the basis of the reframed presentation.
Before accepting the offer, proactively inform the employer that while the resume accurately identifies genuine managerial experience, the dominant substance of his career has been technical design work, and that he is confident in his ability to grow into the management role — giving the employer the opportunity to make a fully informed hiring decision.
Decline the current offer, withdraw the reframed resume, and reapply with a resume that accurately represents the balance of technical and managerial experience, accepting the risk that an honest presentation may reduce his chances of securing a management role.
Engineer Candidate Offered Position Under Reframed Credentials
Should the Ethics Board interpret Section 3(e)'s exaggeration prohibition broadly to cover any materially misleading selective emphasis of genuine qualifications, or narrowly to apply only to deliberate factual untruths about prior employment, anchoring the interpretation in the provision's employer-protection purpose?
The NSPE Ethics Board must interpret Code Section 3(e)'s prohibition on 'exaggerated statements' of qualifications in the context of Doe's resume reframing. The Board must decide whether the prohibition applies to any favorable selective emphasis of genuine experience, or whether it is limited to deliberate factual fabrications — such as invented job titles or false credentials. No prior precedent directly governs the emphasis-versus-exaggeration boundary, and the Board must choose an interpretive framework.
Interpret Section 3(e) expansively to prohibit any resume structuring that creates a materially false overall impression of the engineer's qualification profile, even where individual statements are technically accurate, finding that deliberate inversion of experience proportions constitutes an exaggerated qualification statement regardless of whether discrete facts are fabricated.
Interpret Section 3(e) by reference to its employer-protection purpose, limiting its scope to deliberate fabrications of facts — invented credentials, false job titles, nonexistent responsibilities — and finding that selective emphasis of genuine, if minor, qualifications falls within the permissible zone of professional self-presentation so long as no factual falsehood is asserted.
Adopt an intermediate interpretive standard that permits selective emphasis only where the engineer genuinely possesses some degree of competence in the emphasized area, treating the genuine-competence prerequisite as the operative ethical threshold — finding no violation where real competence exists but flagging the conduct as approaching the boundary and warranting caution.
Should Doe treat his economic hardship and the employment counselor's professional advice as sufficient justification to proceed with the reframed resume strategy, or must he independently evaluate the ethical permissibility of the strategy and refrain from misrepresentation regardless of his circumstances?
Doe is aware that his decision to reframe his resume was made in the context of genuine economic hardship — prolonged unemployment following industry-wide aerospace layoffs, exhaustion of his technical specialty market, and repeated rejection by prospective employers. He has also received explicit advice from a professional employment counselor that management roles represent his only viable path forward. Before submitting the reframed resume, Doe must assess whether these circumstances affect his ethical obligations.
Treat the combination of genuine economic necessity and a professional employment counselor's explicit recommendation as sufficient ethical cover to proceed with the reframed resume, reasoning that the extraordinary circumstances of industry-wide unemployment and the counselor's expertise justify departing from strict qualification accuracy.
Recognize that economic hardship and third-party advisor guidance do not transfer or suspend personal professional ethical responsibility, conduct an independent assessment of whether the reframed resume crosses into misrepresentation, and decline to submit it if that assessment reveals a material distortion of the actual qualification profile — even at the cost of continued unemployment.
Before acting on the employment counselor's advice, consult a professional ethics resource — such as the NSPE ethics hotline or a trusted senior colleague — to obtain an independent assessment of whether the proposed resume restructuring falls within the permissible zone of selective emphasis or crosses into prohibited misrepresentation, and condition submission on that assessment.
Unemployed Engineer Under Economic Pressure with Third-Party Advisor Guidance
Should the Board supplement its finding of no violation with explicit guidance establishing the conditions under which selective emphasis of genuine but minor qualifications crosses into prohibited misrepresentation, or should it issue the ruling without elaboration and leave boundary-setting to future cases?
Following the Board's ruling that Doe's resume reframing did not violate the code, a broader systemic question emerges: the Board's reasoning implicitly condones a resume strategy that, if widely adopted by engineers facing similar industry contractions, could systematically erode the reliability of engineering qualification representations. The Board must decide whether its ruling should be accompanied by guidance addressing the limits of the genuine-competence threshold and the conditions under which selective emphasis becomes impermissible — or whether the ruling should stand without such qualification.
Accompany the finding of no violation with explicit articulation of the conditions that made Doe's conduct permissible — genuine underlying competence, absence of factual fabrication, employer's retained ability to assess competence — and issue cautionary guidance that conduct approaching but not crossing these conditions warrants heightened ethical scrutiny, discouraging engineers from treating the ruling as broad license for resume embellishment.
Confine the ruling strictly to the facts presented — finding no violation on Doe's specific resume under the deliberate-untruth threshold — without elaborating general principles or boundary conditions, leaving the development of broader standards to future cases and avoiding the risk of inadvertently expanding or contracting the permissible zone through dicta.
Find no violation under the existing code as written and interpreted, but simultaneously refer the case to the NSPE code revision committee as illustrating a gap in the current exaggeration prohibition — recommending that the code be amended to explicitly address the boundary between permissible selective emphasis and prohibited misleading omission of material qualification context.
NSPE Ethics Board as Standard-Setting Body
Doe Adjacent Domain Competence Self-Assessment Non-Excuse
Doe felt he could perform satisfactorily at a higher managerial level if given the opportunity — a sincere belief — but this did not authorize him to misrepresent the minor nature of his actual managerial experience to obtain that opportunity.
Adjacent Domain Competence Self-Assessment Misrepresentation Non-Excuse Constraint
John Doe was constrained from using his sincere but unverified belief that he could perform satisfactorily at a higher managerial level as a justification for misrepresenting his actual documented experience on his resume; his good-faith self-assessment of potential did not transform the misrepresentation of his past experience into a permissible statement.
NSPE Code of Ethics Section 3(e); NSPE Code II.2.a
Doe had had some managerial and administrative experience of a minor nature in connection with his former employment but felt he could perform satisfactorily at a higher level in that related field of technical activity if given the opportunity.
At the time of resume preparation and submission
Doe BER Intent-Differentiated Misrepresentation Severity — Deliberate Intent Present
The deliberate nature of Doe's resume restructuring — devised specifically after repeated rejections to overcome the perceived deficiency — distinguishes his conduct from inadvertent omission and triggers the higher-severity misrepresentation finding.
BER Precedent Intent-Differentiated Misrepresentation Severity Calibration Constraint
John Doe's conduct fell on the high-severity end of the intent-differentiated misrepresentation spectrum: unlike inadvertent or oversight-based misrepresentation, Doe deliberately devised a new resume strategy after repeated rejections with the clear intent and purpose of enhancing his apparent managerial qualifications, precluding any defense based on inadvertence and placing his conduct squarely within the more serious violation category.
BER Case 83-1; BER Case 90-4; NSPE Code of Ethics
After being turned down repeatedly for technical managerial or administrative positions because his resume showed a lack of such experience, he devised a new resume which played down his technical design experience and expertise
Doe BER Resume Misrepresentation Spectrum Triangulation
BER Dual-Precedent Resume Misrepresentation Spectrum Triangulation Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to triangulate between BER precedents on permissible selective emphasis and impermissible misrepresentation to correctly locate his own resume strategy on the spectrum, recognizing that his conduct crossed from the permissible zone into the impermissible zone
Doe's case is directly addressed by BER Case 72-11 and related precedents on the boundary between permissible resume emphasis and impermissible misrepresentation
Implementing a resume strategy that, while superficially resembling permissible selective emphasis, in fact crossed into impermissible misrepresentation by inverting the actual balance of his career experience
John Doe Resume Misrepresenting Job-Seeking Engineer
he devised a new resume which played down his technical design experience and expertise and emphasized his minor managerial and administrative function in his former employment as an important responsibility
Doe Career-Phase Ethics Universal Applicability — Employment Seeking Phase
Doe's status as an unemployed engineer seeking a new position did not place him outside the scope of professional ethics obligations; the ethics of pre-employment representations fall squarely within the scope of professional ethics review.
Career-Phase Ethics Universal Applicability Constraint
John Doe was constrained by the full scope of NSPE professional ethics obligations during the employment-seeking phase of his career following the aerospace industry layoffs; the fact that he was between positions, experiencing economic hardship, or in a career transition did not reduce or suspend his ethical obligations regarding honest self-representation.
Along with thousands of other engineers in the aerospace industry, he was laid off when contracts with his company were terminated and new work was not forthcoming.
Throughout the period of unemployment and job-seeking
After many months of seeking a new job in his specialized field with no success
Doe Competence Constraint — Managerial Role Beyond Demonstrated Track Record
Doe's actual competence profile — dominant technical design, minor managerial — constrained what he could honestly represent on his resume when seeking managerial positions, creating the tension between his career transition goals and his ethical obligations.
John Doe was constrained by the boundaries of his demonstrated competence: twelve years of highly technical engineering design work with only minor managerial and administrative experience constituted the actual competence boundary within which he could honestly represent himself as qualified, limiting his ability to truthfully claim readiness for higher-level engineering management and administration roles without misrepresentation.
John Doe had been employed as a design engineer in an aerospace company for twelve years, during which time he had been assigned to the performance of highly technical and complex engineering design work.
At the time of seeking employment in engineering management and administration roles
Doe had had some managerial and administrative experience of a minor nature in connection with his former employment
Doe Consulting vs Employment Context Competence Flexibility — Employment Context Non-Remediation
Doe obtained a new job involving responsibilities in his general field of technical expertise through the misrepresentative resume; the employment context meant he could not remediate any competence gap through consulting-style arrangements.
Consulting vs. Employment Context Competence Flexibility Differential Constraint
John Doe, by seeking an employment position in engineering management and administration, was constrained by the employment-context rule that precludes consulting-style competence remediation mechanisms — he could not, once employed, subcontract or joint-venture to supply missing managerial competence, making it ethically impermissible to accept a position whose core duties fell outside his demonstrated competence on the assumption that on-the-job learning would suffice.
NSPE Code II.2.a; BER Cases 85-3 and 94-8
At the time of accepting the new employment position
Doe Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Embellishment Aerospace Unemployment Discussion
Doe faced prolonged unemployment following aerospace industry contraction; the BER noted this context but did not treat it as an excuse for the embellishment, instead evaluating whether the conduct independently fell within permissible emphasis
Employment Seeking Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Misrepresentation Constraint
Doe's genuine economic hardship arising from the aerospace unemployment crisis and the drying-up of his technical specialty did not excuse or justify his embellishment of his experience on his resume; the BER acknowledged the hardship context but evaluated the conduct on its ethical merits independently of the economic pressure, finding non-violation only because the conduct fell within permissible emphasis rather than because hardship excused it.
Under the stated facts there is little doubt that Doe embellished the facts of his experience in order to obtain new employment, his field of technical expertise having 'dried up' during the aerospace unemployment crisis.
At the time of resume submission following aerospace industry layoffs
Doe Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Self-Recognition
Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Resume Misrepresentation Self-Recognition Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to recognize that his genuine economic hardship arising from industry-wide layoffs and prolonged unemployment did not constitute ethical justification for misrepresenting the balance of his qualifications on his resume
Doe was laid off along with thousands of other aerospace engineers when contracts were terminated, and after many months of unsuccessful job searching devised a deceptive resume
Implementing a misrepresentative resume strategy despite the availability of ethically permissible alternatives, treating economic hardship as a justifying circumstance rather than an irrelevant factor
Doe Employment Competitive Pressure Non-Justification Self-Application
Employment Competitive Pressure Non-Justification for Resume Deception Self-Application Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to recognize that the highly competitive employment environment and repeated rejections did not constitute ethical justification for intentionally obscuring the truth about the nature and balance of his professional experience
Doe's decision to restructure his resume after many months of unsuccessful job searching and repeated rejections for managerial positions
Proceeding with a deceptive resume strategy after repeated rejections, treating the competitive employment pressure as justification for misrepresentation rather than recognizing it as ethically irrelevant to the honesty obligation
After being turned down repeatedly for technical managerial or administrative positions because his resume showed a lack of such experience, he devised a new resume which played down his technical design experience
Doe Employment Seeking Economic Hardship Non-Excuse
Doe was laid off along with thousands of other aerospace engineers, spent many months unsuccessfully seeking work in his specialty, and was advised by an employment counselor that management roles were his only opportunity — none of which excused the subsequent resume misrepresentation.
John Doe was constrained from invoking his prolonged unemployment following aerospace industry layoffs, his many months of unsuccessful job-seeking, or the employment counselor's advice as justification or mitigation for misrepresenting the balance of his professional experience on his resume; the economic hardship he faced did not suspend or relax his duty of non-deception in professional self-representation.
Throughout the period of unemployment and job-seeking following aerospace industry layoffs
After many months of seeking a new job in his specialized field with no success he was advised by an employment counselor that his only opportunity lay in finding a position involving management and administration of engineering work.
Doe Ethics Code Purposive Scope Employment Qualification Employer Protection Reading
Ethics Code Purposive Scope Expansive Interpretation Capability
The NSPE Board demonstrated the capability to interpret Section 3(e) by reference to its employer-protection purpose — protecting prospective employers from being deceived about engineer competence — rather than by a narrow textual reading limited to employment service listings.
Board's purposive interpretation of Section 3(e) to determine both its scope (covering employment generally) and its threshold (deliberate untruths, not mere emphasis).
The board's statement that 'The purpose of Section 3(e), we prefer to believe, is to protect a prospective employer from being deceived as to the competence of an engineer-applicant in order that the employer not be tricked into entrusting important engineering decisions to one not qualified to make them.'
Doe Exaggeration-vs-Emphasis Deliberate-Untruth Threshold Self-Application
Exaggeration-vs-Emphasis Code Term Deliberate-Untruth Threshold Interpretation Capability
Doe possessed, but failed to fully exercise, the capability to recognize that the ethics code's prohibition on 'exaggerated' qualification statements applied only to deliberate factual untruths — and that his conduct, while ethically borderline, was ultimately condoned as emphasis rather than exaggeration because he made no affirmative false statements of fact about his prior employment.
Doe restructured his resume to strongly emphasize managerial and administrative experience while de-emphasizing twelve years of technical design work, in the context of the aerospace unemployment crisis.
The board's finding that Doe's conduct fell below the deliberate-untruth threshold, condoning it as a degree of emphasis rather than exaggeration, implicitly reflects the interpretive standard Doe should have applied to self-regulate his resume conduct.
we are inclined to the more charitable view that his action can be condoned as something less than an 'exaggeration' in that it more nearly might be considered a degree of emphasis.
We hold that the word 'exaggerated' in the code applies only to deliberate untruths of the facts of former employment rather than the emphasis placed on the degree of experience or other qualifications which may be involved.
Doe Exaggeration Deliberate Untruth Definitional Boundary Resume Aerospace
Doe restructured his resume to strongly emphasize minor managerial and administrative experience while de-emphasizing twelve years of dominant technical design experience; the BER determined this constituted permissible emphasis rather than prohibited exaggeration because Doe could truthfully show some degree of competence in the emphasized area
Exaggeration-Deliberate-Untruth Definitional Boundary Constraint
Doe was constrained by the code prohibition on 'exaggerated' qualification statements, which the BER held applies only to deliberate factual untruths about former employment — not to selective emphasis of genuine qualifications; because Doe's resume restructuring involved emphasis of genuine (if minor) managerial experience rather than fabrication of experience that did not exist, his conduct fell within the permissible emphasis zone rather than the prohibited exaggeration zone.
At the time of resume submission and employment application
It would be easy to say that his distortion of his experience was an 'exaggeration' of the facts and thus cannot be excused as an ethical matter.
Doe Genuine Competence Minimum Threshold Managerial Emphasis Permissibility
The BER's finding of non-violation was explicitly conditioned on the fact that Doe 'could truthfully show some degree of competence in the managerial and administrative technical area of the employment' — establishing the minimum competence floor for permissible emphasis
Genuine Competence Minimum Threshold Permissible Emphasis Constraint
Doe's selective emphasis of his managerial and administrative experience was permissible only because he could truthfully show some degree of genuine competence in that area — the minimum threshold for permissible emphasis; had Doe lacked any genuine competence in the emphasized area, his strong emphasis would have crossed into prohibited exaggeration regardless of the absence of deliberate factual untruths about specific prior employment facts.
Doe Genuine Underlying Competence Condoning Condition Self-Assessment Aerospace Management
Genuine Underlying Competence Condoning Condition Self-Assessment Capability
Doe possessed some genuine, if limited, managerial and administrative technical competence that provided the factual predicate for the board's condoning of his emphasis — he could truthfully show some degree of competence in the emphasized area, which distinguished his conduct from a complete fabrication.
Doe had twelve years of aerospace experience that included some managerial and administrative technical work, even though the predominant balance was technical design work.
The board's finding that 'Doe could truthfully show some degree of competence in the managerial and administrative technical area of the employment, even though he strongly emphasized its extent and level.'
To be sure, what we have said is a matter of degree.
Doe Inadvertent vs Intentional Misrepresentation Distinction
Inadvertent Oversight vs. Intentional Misrepresentation Ethical Distinction Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to recognize that his resume restructuring was not an inadvertent oversight but an intentional strategy designed to create a false impression, and that this intentional character placed his conduct squarely within the category of impermissible misrepresentation rather than excusable inaccuracy
Doe consciously and deliberately restructured his resume after career counseling and repeated rejections, making the misrepresentation intentional rather than inadvertent
Deliberately devising a new resume strategy after repeated rejections, with the specific purpose of creating a different impression of his qualifications — a purposeful act rather than an inadvertent omission
Doe Pertinent Fact Dual-Element Misrepresentation Test Application
Doe's deliberate restructuring of his resume after repeated rejections demonstrates both elements: the experience balance was pertinent to the employer's decision, and Doe's intent was specifically to enhance his apparent managerial qualifications.
Pertinent Fact Dual-Element Misrepresentation Prohibition Constraint
John Doe was constrained from making representations on his resume that satisfied both elements of the pertinent-fact misrepresentation test: (1) misrepresentation of pertinent facts — the balance of twelve years of technical design versus minor managerial experience was clearly and decisively relevant to the employer's hiring decision — and (2) intent and purpose to enhance his qualifications — Doe deliberately devised the new resume framing after repeated rejections specifically to obtain a managerial position.
After being turned down repeatedly for technical managerial or administrative positions because his resume showed a lack of such experience, he devised a new resume which played down his technical design experience and expertise and emphasized his minor managerial and administrative function in his former employment as an important responsibility.
Doe Pertinent Fact Misrepresentation Test Application
Pertinent Fact Dual-Element Misrepresentation Test Application Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to apply the dual-element misrepresentation test to his own resume, failing to recognize that (1) the balance of managerial versus technical experience was a pertinent fact of decisive significance to prospective employers, and (2) his resume was intentionally designed to enhance his apparent managerial qualifications
Doe's deliberate restructuring of his resume to emphasize minor managerial experience and de-emphasize dominant technical design experience for the purpose of obtaining managerial employment
Devising a resume strategy that satisfied both elements of the misrepresentation test — pertinent fact (experience balance) and intent to enhance qualifications — without recognizing the ethical violation this constituted
Doe Resume Competitive Employment Ethical Stakes Recognition
Resume Competitive Employment Context Ethical Stakes Recognition Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to recognize the heightened ethical stakes of resume misrepresentation in the professional employment context, specifically that his resume was the primary mechanism by which prospective employers would evaluate his qualifications and that misrepresentation directly undermined their ability to make informed hiring decisions
Doe's resume was the primary screening mechanism for prospective employers evaluating his suitability for managerial engineering positions
Treating the resume as a marketing document subject to sales-technique latitude rather than recognizing it as a professional qualification statement carrying heightened honesty obligations
After being turned down repeatedly for technical managerial or administrative positions because his resume showed a lack of such experience, he devised a new resume
Doe Resume Emphasis Permissible Boundary Violation
Doe restructured his resume after repeated rejections for managerial roles, de-emphasizing twelve years of technical design work and elevating minor managerial experience to appear as an important responsibility, ultimately obtaining a new position.
Resume Emphasis Permissible Boundary Non-Deception Constraint
John Doe was constrained from restructuring his resume in a manner that crossed from permissible selective emphasis into prohibited misrepresentation — specifically, he could not play down twelve years of dominant technical design experience while elevating minor managerial functions to appear as important responsibilities, as this framing deceived the prospective employer about his actual competence profile for the managerial role sought.
At the time of resume preparation and submission to prospective employers
Doe Resume Experience Balance Proportionality Distortion
Doe's twelve years were overwhelmingly technical design work; his managerial experience was explicitly described as 'minor' — yet the revised resume inverted this balance, presenting the minor as important and suppressing the dominant.
Resume Experience Balance Proportionality Misrepresentation Constraint
John Doe was constrained from systematically de-emphasizing twelve years of dominant technical design experience while simultaneously elevating minor managerial and administrative functions to appear as important responsibilities, as this distortion of the proportional balance between experience categories created a materially false impression about his actual competence profile that was pertinent to the employer's hiring decision.
At the time of resume preparation and submission to the aerospace company that hired him
Doe Resume Experience Balance Proportionality Misrepresentation Aerospace Unemployment
Doe's twelve years of technical design experience was systematically de-emphasized while minor managerial experience was strongly emphasized; the BER acknowledged this constituted embellishment but found it fell short of prohibited exaggeration
Doe was constrained to preserve accurate proportionality in the representation of his experience balance on his resume; his systematic de-emphasis of twelve years of dominant technical design experience and elevation of minor managerial functions created a materially false impression of his competence profile, which the BER found to constitute embellishment of the facts of his experience — though ultimately condoned as permissible emphasis rather than prohibited exaggeration given the first-impression context and Doe's genuine minimum competence in the emphasized area.
Doe Resume Implication-Based Deception Self-Recognition
Resume Implication-Based Intentional Deception Self-Recognition Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to recognize that his restructured resume, while not containing explicit false statements, was intentionally constructed to create a misleading impression that his primary experience was managerial rather than technical design
Doe's intentional redesign of his resume after career counseling, with the deliberate purpose of obtaining a managerial position by creating an impression inconsistent with his actual career history
Deliberately structuring the resume to imply managerial seniority by de-emphasizing twelve years of technical work and amplifying minor administrative functions, resulting in a hired position based on a false impression
Doe Resume Omission Materiality Self-Assessment
Resume Omission Materiality Self-Assessment Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to assess whether the systematic de-emphasis of twelve years of technical design experience on his resume rose to the level of a material omission that a reasonable prospective employer would consider significant in evaluating his actual competence and suitability for managerial positions
Doe's revised resume systematically downplayed twelve years of technical design work — the dominant feature of his career — in favor of highlighting minor managerial functions
Treating the de-emphasis of dominant technical experience as a permissible omission rather than recognizing it as a material misrepresentation that would affect a prospective employer's hiring decision
he devised a new resume which played down his technical design experience and expertise and emphasized his minor managerial and administrative function
Doe Resume Role-Balance Proportional Representation
Resume Role-Balance Accurate Proportional Representation Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to ensure that his resume accurately represented the proportional balance of twelve years of technical design experience versus minor managerial and administrative functions, instead inverting that balance to create a false impression of managerial seniority
Doe's twelve-year career was predominantly technical design work, with only minor managerial and administrative experience; his revised resume inverted this balance
Restructuring his resume to play down dominant technical design experience spanning twelve years while amplifying minor managerial functions to appear as important responsibilities, resulting in a document that misrepresented the actual distribution of his career experience
he devised a new resume which played down his technical design experience and expertise and emphasized his minor managerial and administrative function in his former employment as an important responsibility.
Doe Resume Selective Emphasis Boundary Discrimination
Resume Selective Emphasis vs. Misrepresentation Boundary Discrimination Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to correctly distinguish between permissible selective emphasis of his minor managerial experience and impermissible misrepresentation that deceived prospective employers about the actual balance of his twelve-year career
Doe's resume restructuring after repeated rejections for managerial positions, resulting in a document that inverted the actual balance of his career experience
Devising a resume that played down twelve years of technical design experience and elevated minor managerial functions to appear as important responsibilities, crossing from permissible emphasis into deceptive misrepresentation
Doe Resume Selective Emphasis vs Misrepresentation Boundary Aerospace Management Case
Doe exercised, imperfectly, the capability to remain within the permissible zone of selective emphasis — his conduct was ultimately condoned as emphasis rather than misrepresentation because he did not make affirmative false statements, though he pushed the boundary by strongly de-emphasizing twelve years of technical design experience.
Doe restructured his resume to strongly emphasize managerial experience while de-emphasizing technical design work during the aerospace unemployment crisis.
The board's finding that Doe's conduct fell on the permissible side of the emphasis/misrepresentation boundary, condoning it as a degree of emphasis rather than exaggeration, while noting it was 'a matter of degree.'
This is an established and accepted form of sales technique in which the seller proclaims all of the virtues of his product and conveniently ignores its less desirable features.
Doe Sales Technique Analogy Resume Emphasis Permissibility Aerospace Management
The BER analogized Doe's resume restructuring to accepted sales technique, permitting selective emphasis of genuine qualifications while noting that the permissibility is a matter of degree and subject to the minimum competence threshold
Sales Technique Analogy Resume Emphasis Ethical Permissibility Constraint
Doe's selective emphasis of his managerial qualifications while de-emphasizing his dominant technical design experience was constrained to remain within the permissible zone of sales-technique-analogous self-presentation — proclaiming genuine virtues while not highlighting less desirable features — provided the emphasis did not cross into deliberate factual untruth; the BER found Doe's conduct fell within this permissible zone, subject to the caveat that the permissibility is a matter of degree.
Doe Section II.5.a Implication Scope Interpretation
Section II.5.a. Implication-Scope Purposive Interpretation Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to recognize that NSPE Code Section II.5.a's prohibition on misrepresentation encompasses not only explicit false statements but also implications — specifically, that a resume structured to imply managerial seniority through selective de-emphasis of dominant technical experience violates the provision's purposive scope
Doe's resume contained no explicit false statements but was intentionally structured to imply a level of managerial experience inconsistent with his actual career history
Implementing a resume strategy that relied on implication rather than explicit falsehood to create a misleading impression, without recognizing that the Code's prohibition extends to such implication-based deception
Doe Third-Party Advisor Non-Absolution Self-Recognition
Third-Party Career Advisor Non-Absolution Personal Ethics Responsibility Capability
John Doe lacked or failed to exercise the capability to recognize that the employment counselor's advice to pursue managerial positions did not authorize or ethically sanction a misrepresentative resume strategy, and that he retained full personal ethical responsibility for the accuracy of his qualification representations
Doe received advice from an employment counselor that his only opportunity lay in management positions, and subsequently devised a resume that misrepresented his experience balance
Implementing a resume strategy that crossed into misrepresentation after receiving career counseling, without independently evaluating the ethical permissibility of the specific approach adopted
he was advised by an employment counselor that his only opportunity lay in finding a position involving management and administration of engineering work.
he devised a new resume which played down his technical design experience and expertise
Doe Third-Party Career Advisor Non-Absolution
The employment counselor advised Doe that management roles were his only opportunity, which Doe used as the impetus for devising a misrepresentative resume — but the counselor's non-engineer commercial advice did not discharge Doe's independent ethical obligation.
Third-Party Career Advisor Resume Strategy Non-Absolution Constraint
John Doe was constrained from treating the employment counselor's advice to seek management positions as an ethical absolution for implementing a misrepresentative resume strategy; Doe bore independent personal responsibility for evaluating whether the resume restructuring strategy recommended by the counselor was ethically permissible under the NSPE Code before implementing it.
At the time of receiving career counselor advice and implementing the revised resume strategy
felt he could perform satisfactorily at a higher level in that related field of technical activity if given the opportunity
John Doe when accepting a position with managerial responsibilities beyond his documented experience
Relevant to whether Doe was qualified to perform the managerial/administrative role he obtained through the embellished resume; the standard requires engineers to undertake assignments only when qualified by education or experience in the specific fields involved
Could set a precedent that weakens the protective force of Section 3(e) in future cases
May encourage engineers in similar economic circumstances to embellish resumes relying on the 'emphasis' distinction
Provides clarity on the boundary between permissible and prohibited resume representation
Obligation to consider contextual and mitigating factors in ethics adjudication
Obligation to establish reasoned precedent in the absence of prior decisions
Obligation to interpret the code in light of its protective purpose rather than purely literally
Obligation to protect the public and employers from genuinely incompetent engineers in critical roles
Charitable interpretation in novel cases without precedent
Distinction between deliberate untruth and selective emphasis as an accepted professional norm
Proportionality between the degree of misrepresentation and the severity of ethical sanction
Purposive statutory and code interpretation focused on protective intent
Recognition of economic duress as a mitigating contextual factor
Establish an interpretive precedent distinguishing prohibited exaggeration from permissible emphasis, thereby avoiding a finding of ethics violation under the specific circumstances of economic duress and partial genuine competence
Assessment of degree and materiality of misrepresentation
Balancing of competing professional obligations
Understanding of aerospace industry employment context
Retrospectively, during ethics case review after the events occurred
Arguably, the obligation to enforce the code's plain language prohibiting exaggerated qualification statements
Obligation to deter resume embellishment as a professional practice regardless of economic circumstances
Obligation to treat all engineers equally regardless of economic context in applying ethics standards
The NSPE ethics board made a deliberate interpretive decision to construe Doe's resume embellishment as permissible 'emphasis' rather than prohibited 'exaggeration' under Code Section 3(e), adopting a charitable and contextual reading of the code in the absence of prior precedent.
Ethics Board Interpretation Decision (Action 4) → Ethics Board Ruling Issued (Event 5)
The NSPE Ethics Board made a deliberate interpretive decision to construe Doe's resume embellishment as falling within the scope of prohibited conduct under the NSPE Code, and the Ethics Board retrospectively analyzed the case and concluded that John Doe's resume modifications constituted an ethical violation
Ethics Board Interpretation Decision (Action 4)
If the Ethics Board had interpreted the NSPE Code as not reaching pre-employment resume conduct, no violation ruling would have issued regardless of Doe's actions; the interpretive decision was independently causally necessary for the ruling's content and scope
Applicable NSPE Code language broad enough to encompass resume conduct
Deliberate decision to classify embellishment as prohibited misrepresentation
Ethics Board's authority to interpret NSPE Code provisions
Factual record of Doe's conduct available for review
Board authority + interpretive decision to include resume conduct within code scope + factual record was sufficient to produce a binding ethics ruling
The ethical status of John Doe's conduct is formally resolved as permissible under professional code; interpretive precedent established distinguishing emphasis from exaggeration in resume presentation
Retrospectively; after all prior events; in the Discussion section of the case
The NSPE Ethics Board retrospectively analyzed the case and concluded that John Doe's resume modifications constituted permissible emphasis rather than prohibited exaggeration under NSPE Code of Ethics Section 3(e). This outcome represents an authoritative professional interpretation of the ethical boundaries of credential presentation.
John Doe transitions from employed aerospace engineer to unemployed job seeker; financial and professional stability disrupted
Beginning of case narrative; prior to job search
An industry-wide aerospace downturn led to contract terminations that resulted in John Doe's layoff after twelve years as a design engineer. This was an external economic shock beyond any individual's control.
Industry Downturn Contract Loss (Event 1) → Prolonged Job Search Failure (Event 2)
An industry-wide aerospace downturn led to contract terminations that resulted in John Doe's layoff, initiating the conditions that made sustained employment in his technical specialty impossible
Industry Downturn Contract Loss (Event 1)
Without the industry downturn, Doe would likely have retained his position or found comparable technical employment; the prolonged failure was a direct product of macro-level market contraction beyond his control
Doe's specialization in a field experiencing sector-wide decline
Industry-wide aerospace contraction reducing available technical positions
Layoff removing Doe from existing employment security
No individual agent, systemic/market-level cause
Combination of sector-wide downturn + technical specialty saturation + loss of incumbent position was sufficient to produce prolonged search failure
John Doe faces a concrete credentialing gap; the proximate trigger for resume manipulation is now established; the ethical decision point regarding resume embellishment is activated
After employment counselor consultation; after pivot in job search strategy; prior to resume embellishment
After pivoting his job search toward management and administration roles as advised, John Doe repeatedly failed to secure such positions because his resume lacked sufficient managerial experience. This outcome was the direct result of the mismatch between his credentials and the requirements of management roles.
Misrepresentation in Business Dealings Standard
As a result he was able to obtain a new job
John Doe in his dealings with prospective employers
Governs the prohibition on making false, misleading, or deceptive statements in professional dealings; applicable to Doe's deliberate framing of minor administrative duties as 'important responsibilities' to gain employment advantage
National Society of Professional Engineers
NSPE Code of Ethics – Section 3(e): Prohibition on Exaggerated Qualification Statements in Employment Listings
We construe Section 3(e) to include employment, although the word 'listed' reference to being 'listed' for employment
Note: The following Code sections no longer exist: Code of Ethics-Section 3(e)-'The engineer will not allow himself to be listed for employment using exaggerated statements of his qualifications.'
The purpose of Section 3(e), we prefer to believe, is to protect a prospective employer from being deceived as to the competence of an engineer-applicant
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in deliberating on Engineer Doe's conduct
The Board construes and applies Section 3(e) to evaluate whether Engineer Doe's emphasis on his managerial and administrative experience constitutes a prohibited 'exaggerated statement' of qualifications when seeking new employment during the aerospace unemployment crisis
Historical (section no longer exists in current Code)
John Doe (engineer subject to professional obligations); ethics reviewers analyzing the case
Primary normative authority governing whether Doe's deliberate embellishment of his managerial experience on his resume constitutes an ethical violation of honesty and integrity obligations
NSPE Ethics Board Employment Qualification Code Provision Scope Extension Doe Case
Employment Qualification Code Provision Scope Extension Purposive Interpretation Capability
The NSPE Board demonstrated the capability to extend the application of Section 3(e) — whose literal text referenced being 'listed' for employment (connoting employment service rosters) — to cover direct employment applications, by reasoning from the employer-protection purpose of the provision.
First-impression determination of whether Section 3(e) applied to Doe's direct resume submissions to aerospace employers, as opposed to listings with employment services.
The board's construction of Section 3(e) to include employment generally, despite the 'listed' language connoting placement on an employment service roster.
We construe Section 3(e) to include employment, although the word 'listed' reference to being 'listed' for employment, although the work 'listed' connotes being placed on the roster of an employment service.
NSPE Ethics Board Exaggeration-vs-Emphasis Deliberate-Untruth Threshold Interpretation Doe Case
The NSPE Board of Ethical Review demonstrated advanced capability to interpret the code term 'exaggerated' as limited to deliberate factual untruths, distinguishing it from permissible degree-of-emphasis conduct, and applied this interpretive holding to condone Doe's resume conduct in the absence of prior precedent.
First-impression interpretation of Section 3(e) in the context of the aerospace unemployment crisis resume case.
The board's holding that 'exaggerated' applies only to deliberate untruths of facts of former employment, not to emphasis placed on degree of experience, and its application of this threshold to find Doe's conduct condoned.
In the absence of any previous decisions on this section of the code, however, and under the circumstances stated, we are inclined to the more charitable view
NSPE Ethics Board Genuine Competence Condoning Condition Assessment Doe Case
The NSPE Board demonstrated the capability to assess whether the condoning condition for permissible emphasis was satisfied — finding that Doe's genuine, if limited, managerial competence provided the factual basis for condoning his emphasis, and implicitly establishing that the absence of any genuine underlying competence would have rendered the emphasis impermissible.
Board evaluation of whether Doe's selective emphasis of managerial experience crossed the ethical threshold given his genuine, if limited, actual competence in that area.
The board's factual finding and legal conclusion that Doe's genuine underlying competence in the emphasized area was the key condition distinguishing permissible emphasis from impermissible exaggeration.
NSPE Ethics Board Resume Selective Emphasis Misrepresentation Boundary Doe Case
The NSPE Board demonstrated expert capability to locate Doe's conduct on the spectrum from permissible emphasis to impermissible misrepresentation, finding it on the permissible side based on the absence of deliberate factual untruths and the presence of genuine underlying competence.
Board evaluation of whether Doe's resume conduct violated Section 3(e) in the context of the aerospace unemployment crisis.
The board's analysis distinguishing Doe's emphasis from exaggeration, referencing the sales technique analogy and the deliberate-untruth threshold.
John Doe transitions from unemployed job seeker to employed professional; immediate financial pressure relieved; new professional obligations and potential ongoing ethical exposure activated
After creation and submission of embellished resume; end of active job search
Following the submission of the embellished resume, John Doe successfully secured a new position in his general technical field. This outcome was the direct result of the revised resume presenting his credentials in a way that satisfied employer screening criteria.
No Prior Precedent Section 3e Charitable Interpretation BER Doe
The BER explicitly noted the absence of any previous decisions on Section 3(e) as a factor supporting a more charitable interpretation of Doe's conduct, distinguishing this case from situations where established precedent would govern
No-Prior-Precedent Charitable Interpretation Leniency Constraint
In the absence of any prior BER decisions interpreting Section 3(e)'s prohibition on exaggerated qualification statements, the BER was constrained to adopt a more charitable interpretation of Doe's conduct — treating his resume restructuring as permissible emphasis rather than prohibited exaggeration — because the novel interpretive question warranted leniency in a first-impression case where the conduct fell in a gray area.
In the absence of any previous decisions on this section of the code, however, and under the circumstances stated, we are inclined to the more charitable view that his action can be condoned as something less than an 'exaggeration' in that it more nearly might be considered a degree of emphasis.
At the time of the BER's first-impression ruling on Section 3(e)
Technical expertise would become less visible to prospective employers
Would need to compete against candidates with stronger managerial credentials
Reasonable responsiveness to professional market realities
Responsiveness to informed vocational guidance
Secure employment by targeting a broader category of roles that matched available market demand
After many months of unsuccessful job searching post-layoff
After months of failed job searching in his technical specialty, Doe chose to follow his employment counselor's advice and redirect his job search toward management and administrative roles rather than continuing to pursue purely technical positions.
Pivot Job Search Strategy (Action 1) → Management Application Rejections (Event 3)
After months of failed job searching in his technical specialty, Doe chose to follow his employment advisor's guidance and redirect toward management and administration roles, which then produced a new pattern of rejections in that domain
Without the pivot, Doe would have continued failing in technical searches; the pivot created a new causal pathway that exposed a different credential gap, making management rejections a predictable downstream consequence
Management Application Rejections (Event 3)
Decision to pivot away from technical specialty toward management roles
Employer screening processes filtering for demonstrated management background
Lack of documented managerial credentials or experience on existing resume
John Doe (primary); employment advisor (shared/indirect)
Pivot decision + absence of verifiable management credentials + competitive managerial job market was sufficient to generate repeated rejections in the new domain
Prolonged unemployment intensifies financial and psychological pressure on John Doe; conditions ripen for seeking external career advice and reconsidering strategy
Many months after layoff; prior to employment counselor consultation
After many months of job searching in his technical specialty, John Doe repeatedly failed to secure employment, resulting in an extended period of unemployment. This outcome was the cumulative result of market conditions and the mismatch between available positions and his profile.
National Society of Professional Engineers (via Code Section 3(e))
Professional Norm Against Exaggerated Qualification Statements in Engineering Employment
We hold that the word 'exaggerated' in the code applies only to deliberate untruths of the facts of former employment rather than the emphasis placed on the degree of experience or other qualifications which may be involved
The purpose of Section 3(e), we prefer to believe, is to protect a prospective employer from being deceived as to the competence of an engineer-applicant in order that the employer not be tricked into entrusting important engineering decisions to one not qualified to make them
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in distinguishing permissible 'emphasis' from prohibited 'exaggeration'
Provides the substantive professional standard against which Doe's conduct is measured — the Board interprets the standard to prohibit deliberate factual untruths about prior employment, but not the selective emphasis of genuine qualifications
Interpreted in this case as applying to deliberate untruths, not mere emphasis
After being turned down repeatedly for technical managerial or administrative positions because his resume showed a lack of such experience
John Doe when preparing his resume; prospective employers evaluating his qualifications
Governs the obligation of engineers to honestly and accurately represent their qualifications, experience, and capabilities when seeking professional engagements; directly implicated by Doe's decision to overstate his managerial experience on his resume
Was Doe in violation of the code for rewriting his employment resume to emphasize his managerial and administrative experience and play down his technical experience in order to obtain new employment?
If Doe performs poorly or causes harm in the managerial role he obtained through his reframed resume, does the manner in which he secured the position retroactively render his conduct a more serious ethical violation than the Board's ruling suggests?
Does the prospective employer bear any independent obligation to conduct more rigorous verification of Doe's managerial qualifications, and does the employer's failure to do so diminish the ethical weight of Doe's resume reframing?
At what point does a pattern of industry-wide layoffs and structural unemployment create a systemic ethical problem that the profession itself must address, rather than placing the entire burden of honest self-representation on individual engineers like Doe who face prolonged unemployment?
Should the Board have addressed whether Doe had an affirmative obligation to disclose the full proportional balance of his technical versus managerial experience to his new employer once hired, even if the resume itself did not constitute a violation?
Does the Contextual Resume Emphasis Permissibility Principle conflict with the Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition when an engineer deliberately structures factually accurate statements to create a false overall impression of his primary professional identity?
How should the Deliberate Untruth Threshold be reconciled with the Intentional Deception Versus Inadvertent Inaccuracy Distinction when Doe's conduct was clearly intentional and strategic but involved no literally false statements — does intentionality alone satisfy the deliberate untruth threshold even absent fabrication?
Does the Ethics Code Provision Teleological Scope Limitation Applied to Section 3(e) — which the Board used to narrow the provision's reach — conflict with the Honesty in Professional Representations principle, which operates as a broad foundational obligation not bounded by the specific purpose of any single code section?
Does the Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Acknowledged But Contextually Mitigated principle create an internally inconsistent standard — simultaneously affirming that economic hardship cannot excuse misrepresentation while allowing the severity of Doe's unemployment circumstances to soften the ethical judgment — and if so, does this undermine the universality of the Pertinent Fact Misrepresentation Intent-and-Purpose Dual-Element Test?
From a deontological perspective, did Doe violate his categorical duty of honest representation to prospective employers by deliberately restructuring his resume to create a misleading impression of his managerial experience, regardless of whether the individual statements were technically true?
From a consequentialist perspective, did the net outcome of Doe securing employment in a role he believed he could perform satisfactorily justify the deceptive resume strategy, when weighed against the harms of eroding employer trust in engineering credentials, disadvantaging honestly self-presenting competitors, and setting a precedent for resume embellishment under economic pressure?
From a virtue ethics perspective, did Doe demonstrate the professional integrity and honesty characteristic of an engineer of good character when he intentionally reframed minor managerial duties as important responsibilities, or did economic hardship reveal a willingness to compromise core professional virtues when personally convenient?
From a deontological perspective, does the Board's teleological interpretation of Code Section 3(e) — limiting its scope to protect employers from unqualified candidates — inadvertently create a duty loophole that permits deliberate impression management so long as the candidate believes themselves minimally competent, thereby undermining the universalizability of honest credential representation as a professional norm?
If Doe had proactively disclosed to prospective employers during interviews that his managerial experience was limited but that he was confident in his ability to grow into the role, would he have been more likely to secure employment without ethical compromise, and would the Board's analysis have changed?
What if Doe had accepted the new position and subsequently demonstrated clear incompetence in the managerial role — would the Board's finding of no violation hold, given that the consequentialist rationale of genuine underlying competence would have been falsified, and would the employer's harm then retroactively establish a code violation?
If the employment counselor had advised Doe to fabricate entirely fictitious managerial projects rather than merely reframe real but minor experience, would the Board's emphasis-versus-exaggeration threshold have clearly been crossed, and does this comparison illuminate whether Doe's actual conduct was meaningfully distinguishable from outright fabrication?
If Doe had been seeking a position in an entirely unrelated field — rather than a managerial role within his general domain of technical expertise — would the Board's condoning condition of genuine underlying competence have been absent, and would the outcome of the ethics ruling have been different?
Section 3e Employment Scope Interpretive Extension Doe Case
Engineer Doe submitted an embellished resume directly to an aerospace company seeking employment; the BER had to determine whether Section 3(e) applied to direct employment applications rather than only to employment service listings
NSPE Board of Ethical Review interpreting Section 3(e)
Code Provision Employment Scope Interpretive Extension Constraint
The BER was constrained to construe Section 3(e)'s prohibition on exaggerated qualification statements as applying to ordinary employment applications and resume submissions, notwithstanding that the word 'listed' in the provision literally connotes placement on an employment service roster, because the provision's employer-protection purpose encompasses all employment-seeking conduct.
At the time of the BER's interpretive ruling in this case and prospectively
he was laid off when contracts with his company were terminated and new work was not forthcoming
Entity1 ends exactly when Entity2 begins
creation of revised resume before obtaining new job
he devised a new resume...As a result he was able to obtain a new job which involved responsibilities in his general field of technical expertise
Defeasibility edge from tensionresolution
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.87
The board avoided relying on economic hardship as an excuse by grounding its holding in the conduct's character (emphasis rather than deliberate untruth), thereby preserving the principle that economic hardship does not excuse misrepresentation while reaching a charitable outcome on the merits
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.88
Economic hardship may be relevant to the moral blameworthiness of the actor and the proportionality of professional discipline, but it does not alter the ethical character of the act itself; the misrepresentation remains a violation regardless of the sympathetic circumstances
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.86
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.92
The board resolved the tension by anchoring the threshold in the deliberate-untruth requirement, finding that Doe's conduct, while potentially misleading in degree, did not involve the fabrication of non-existent experience
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.91
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.85
The board's purposive limitation was constrained by its acknowledgment that the analysis is 'a matter of degree,' implicitly recognizing that the same interpretive approach could reach different results in cases of more extreme emphasis
The Contextual Resume Emphasis Permissibility Principle permits favorable framing of genuine experience, but requires the overall portrait to correspond to actual experience; here, the systematic suppression of primary expertise and inflation of minor responsibilities exceeds permissible emphasis and constitutes prohibited misrepresentation
The permissibility principle permits favorable framing of genuine experience; the implication-as-misrepresentation principle is triggered when the framing choices are designed to obscure truth rather than present it favorably — here, the systematic suppression of primary expertise crosses into prohibited implication-based misrepresentation
Reliance on third-party professional advice is generally reasonable, but professional ethical obligations are personal and non-delegable; when advisor guidance conflicts with professional ethics, the engineer must follow the ethics code rather than the advisor
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.9
Both elements are clearly present; the intentionality element is established by the deliberate redesign strategy, and the pertinence element is established by the fact that managerial experience was the decisive qualification criterion for the positions sought
The board found that because Doe's emphasis rested on truthful experience (even if the extent was overstated in degree), the deliberate-untruth threshold was not met, and the conduct did not rise to an ethics code violation
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.89
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.83
The board resolved the tension in favor of permissibility by finding that Doe's emphasis rested on a foundation of genuine (if limited) competence, and that the ethics code provision was not designed to prohibit favorable self-presentation but to prevent incompetent engineers from deceiving employers
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.93
The permissibility principle's conditions — no deliberate intent to obscure truth, no material deception as to competence — are not met here; the systematic downplaying of primary expertise and inflation of minor experience constitutes prohibited misrepresentation, not permissible emphasis
source_field=tensionresolution; confidence=0.84
Neither economic hardship nor reliance on employment counselor advice displaces the engineer's personal obligation of honesty in professional representations; the obligation is unconditional
employment counselor advice before repeated rejections for managerial positions
repeated rejections for managerial positions
layoff before many months of unsuccessful job searching
Along with thousands of other engineers in the aerospace industry, he was laid off...After many months of seeking a new job in his specialized field with no success
many months of unsuccessful job searching
many months of unsuccessful job searching before employment counselor advice to pivot to management roles
After many months of seeking a new job in his specialized field with no success he was advised by an employment counselor that his only opportunity lay in finding a position involving management and administration
employment counselor advice to pivot to management roles
minor managerial and administrative experience during twelve years of aerospace employment
he had had some managerial and administrative experience of a minor nature in connection with his former employment
minor managerial and administrative experience
Entity1 occurs entirely within the duration of Entity2
repeated rejections for managerial positions before creation of revised resume
After being turned down repeatedly...he devised a new resume which played down his technical design experience and expertise and emphasized his minor managerial and administrative function
The board acknowledged the tension between the honesty obligation and the accepted practice of favorable self-presentation, ultimately finding that the honesty principle was not violated where emphasis rested on truthful, if limited, experi
Doe's resume revision was a deliberate, calculated strategy — he 'devised' a new resume specifically to overcome repeated rejections — establishing that the misrepresentation was intentional rather than inadvertent, which places it squarely
Doe's resume likely contained no outright false statements — he did have some managerial and administrative experience — but the selective framing created a materially false impression that his primary professional identity was managerial r
Doe's core professional virtue obligation of honesty required him to represent his qualifications accurately to prospective employers; by systematically misrepresenting the balance of his technical versus managerial experience, he violated
Doe's prolonged unemployment following industry-wide aerospace layoffs, combined with repeated rejections and an employment counselor's advice that misrepresentation was his 'only opportunity,' constitutes the paradigm case of economic hard
The board interpreted the scope of Section 3(e)'s prohibition on 'exaggerated statements' by reference to the provision's protective purpose — preventing employers from being deceived about an engineer's competence to make important enginee
The board distinguished between deliberate untruths of facts of former employment (which would constitute prohibited exaggeration) and the degree of emphasis placed on genuine qualifications (which does not), holding that Doe's conduct fell
Both elements of the dual-element test are satisfied in Doe's case: (1) the balance of managerial versus technical experience is a pertinent fact — clearly and decisively relevant — to a prospective employer's decision to hire for a managem
Doe might argue that his resume merely emphasized a genuine — if minor — aspect of his actual experience, which is permissible under the principle that engineers may present qualifications in their most favorable truthful light; however, th
The board acknowledged Doe's genuine economic distress (aerospace unemployment crisis, dried-up specialty) as factual context but did not treat it as an ethical excuse; instead, the board found no violation on the independent ground that th
Doe's resume implied, through structural presentation choices — downplaying technical work, foregrounding managerial responsibilities, characterizing minor functions as 'important' — that his primary professional identity and experience bas
The employment counselor's advice that Doe's 'only opportunity' lay in management roles — which implicitly or explicitly encouraged the resume strategy he adopted — does not transfer ethical responsibility for the resulting misrepresentatio
Doe crafted a resume that strategically downplayed twelve years of technical design experience and elevated minor managerial responsibilities to appear as significant management experience, creating a materially false overall impression of
The board held that Doe's conduct — strongly emphasizing the extent and level of genuine managerial experience — did not constitute 'exaggeration' within the ethics code because it did not involve deliberate untruths about the facts of his
The board held that Doe's strong emphasis on his managerial and administrative technical experience — which he genuinely possessed to some degree — constituted permissible emphasis rather than impermissible exaggeration, because he could tr
Doe was obligated to ensure that his strong emphasis on managerial and administrative technical experience was grounded in genuine, if limited, actual competence in that area; the board found this condition satisfied because Doe could truth
John Doe was obligated to refrain from misrepresenting his qualifications to the aerospace company that ultimately hired him, ensuring that the company's hiring decision was based on an accurate representation of his actual experience profi
Doe remained personally responsible for the ethical accuracy of his resume notwithstanding the employment counselor's advice that management roles were his only opportunity; reliance on the counselor's guidance did not transfer or diminish
John Doe was obligated to ensure that his resume satisfied both elements of the pertinent-fact misrepresentation test: (1) the balance of managerial versus technical experience is a pertinent fact — directly decisive to a prospective employ
John Doe was obligated to ensure that his resume accurately represented the balance of his twelve years of technical design experience versus his minor managerial and administrative responsibilities, and was prohibited from deliberately res
Doe was obligated to remain within the permissible boundary of selective emphasis on his resume — highlighting genuine qualifications without crossing into misrepresentation — and the board found he remained within that boundary because his
John Doe was obligated to accurately represent the balance of his technical design versus managerial and administrative experience on his resume so that prospective employers could make informed hiring decisions, and was prohibited from del
Doe was obligated to refrain from making deliberate factual untruths about his prior employment on his resume; his strong emphasis on genuine managerial experience — without fabricating facts — did not constitute a violation of the exaggera
Doe's genuine economic hardship — prolonged unemployment following aerospace industry layoffs and the drying-up of his technical specialty — did not excuse or justify any misrepresentation on his resume; the board acknowledged the hardship
John Doe was obligated to assess whether the systematic de-emphasis of twelve years of technical design experience on his resume rose to the level of material misrepresentation — recognizing that a reasonable prospective employer seeking a
Doe was obligated to ensure that his selective emphasis of managerial qualifications did not cross into deceiving the prospective employer about his actual competence for the management role; the board found the boundary was not crossed bec
John Doe was obligated to refrain from misrepresenting his qualifications on his resume notwithstanding his genuine economic hardship arising from industry-wide aerospace layoffs, prolonged unemployment, and repeated rejection by prospectiv
John Doe was obligated to refrain from structuring his resume in a manner that implied, through selective framing and strategic de-emphasis, that his primary professional identity and experience was managerial and administrative rather than
John Doe was obligated to independently evaluate the ethical permissibility of his revised resume strategy and to refrain from implementing a misrepresentation strategy even when advised to do so by an employment counselor, recognizing that
John Doe was obligated to ensure that any selective emphasis of his managerial qualifications remained within the permissible zone — i.e., that it did not deceive the prospective employer as to his actual competence for the management role
twelve years of aerospace employment before layoff
John Doe had been employed as a design engineer in an aerospace company for twelve years...he was laid off when contracts with his company were terminated
NSPE Ethics Board Teleological Interpretation Section 3e Doe Case
In the absence of prior precedent interpreting Section 3(e), the board anchored its interpretation in the provision's protective purpose and found that Doe's emphasis of genuine competence did not trigger the prohibition.
NSPE Ethics Review Board (adjudicating body)
Ethics Code Employment Qualification Provision Employer-Protection Teleological Reading Obligation
The ethics board was obligated to interpret Section 3(e)'s prohibition on exaggerated qualification statements by reference to its employer-protection purpose — protecting employers from being deceived as to engineer competence — rather than by a maximally literal reading, and did so by finding that Doe's conduct, while embellished, did not compromise the employer's ability to assess his genuine competence in the managerial area.
At the time of ethics adjudication of Doe's resume conduct
Doe Adjacent Role Competence Self-Assessment Without Track Record
From decision to pursue management positions through acceptance of new role
New employer relying on represented qualifications
Adjacent Role Competence Self-Assessment Without Demonstrated Track Record State
John Doe's sincere but unverified belief in his ability to perform engineering management/administration at a higher level than his documented experience reflects
Acceptance of new position (competence to be demonstrated through performance)
emphasized his minor managerial and administrative function in his former employment as an important responsibility
Employment counselor advice that only viable path is management/administration; Doe's personal assessment that he could perform satisfactorily
Doe Prolonged Aerospace Unemployment Career Transition Pressure
From onset of aerospace unemployment crisis through Doe's job application for managerial/administrative role
his field of technical expertise having 'dried up' during the aerospace unemployment crisis
Prolonged Unemployment Inducing Career Transition Pressure State
Engineer Doe's professional situation following aerospace industry contraction
Obtaining new employment in managerial/administrative engineering role
Doe embellished the facts of his experience in order to obtain new employment
Aerospace industry unemployment crisis causing Doe's technical specialty to 'dry up'
Doe Resume Experience Emphasis Reframing
From creation of reframed resume through successful job acquisition
Other candidates competing for same positions
Resume Experience Emphasis Reframing State
John Doe's deliberate restructuring of his resume to emphasize minor managerial experience over dominant technical design expertise
Successful job offer obtained under reframed resume
As a result he was able to obtain a new job which involved responsibilities in his general field of technical expertise
Repeated rejection for managerial/administrative positions due to resume showing lack of such experience
Doe Resume Qualification Emphasis Reframing
During job application process; evaluated retrospectively by ethics board
Engineer Doe's presentation of managerial/administrative qualifications in job application
Ethics board ruling that conduct constituted permissible emphasis rather than prohibited exaggeration
This is an established and accepted form of sales technique in which the seller proclaims all of the virtues of his product and conveniently ignores its less desirable features
he strongly emphasized its extent and level
it more nearly might be considered a degree of emphasis
Doe's decision to strongly emphasize the extent and level of his managerial/administrative experience beyond its actual scope
Honesty Principle Tension With Favorable Self-Presentation in Doe Resume Case
Doe's resume representation of qualifications to prospective aerospace employer
Contextual Resume Emphasis Permissibility Principle
Resume Selective Emphasis Misrepresentation Prohibition
The board acknowledged the tension between the honesty obligation and the accepted practice of favorable self-presentation, ultimately finding that the honesty principle was not violated where emphasis rested on truthful, if limited, experience rather than fabricated credentials
Honesty in professional representations does not require self-deprecation or equal emphasis on weaknesses; it requires that statements not be deliberate untruths, leaving room for truthful favorable framing
The board found that honesty was satisfied because Doe's representations, while emphasizing favorable aspects, did not involve deliberate falsehoods about facts of his employment history
Under the stated facts there is little doubt that Doe embellished the facts of his experience in order to obtain new employment
Intentional Deception Versus Inadvertent Inaccuracy Invoked By Doe Resume Strategy
Doe's deliberate resume redesign strategy
Economic Hardship Non-Excuse for Professional Misrepresentation
Doe's resume revision was a deliberate, calculated strategy — he 'devised' a new resume specifically to overcome repeated rejections — establishing that the misrepresentation was intentional rather than inadvertent, which places it squarely within the category of ethically prohibited deception
The word 'devised' in the case text signals deliberate intent; Doe consciously engineered the resume to create a false impression after being repeatedly rejected, satisfying the intentionality element that triggers the full ethical prohibition on misrepresentation
Intentional Deception Versus Inadvertent Inaccuracy Distinction in Professional Misrepresentation
Economic hardship provides sympathetic context but does not negate the intentionality of the deception; the deliberate nature of the strategy means this is not an inadvertent error and the full ethical prohibition applies
Aerospace Employer Right to Accurate Qualification Disclosure
The aerospace company hired Doe based on a resume that materially misrepresented the balance of his managerial versus technical experience; the company was the direct victim of the qualification misrepresentation.
Qualifications Non-Falsification and Non-Misrepresentation Obligation
John Doe was obligated to refrain from misrepresenting his qualifications to the aerospace company that ultimately hired him, ensuring that the company's hiring decision was based on an accurate representation of his actual experience profile rather than a strategically distorted resume.
At the time of submitting the revised resume to the hiring company
Doe Resume Misrepresenting Job-Seeking Engineer
{'specialty': 'Aerospace engineering (technical expertise dried up)', 'conduct': 'Emphasized managerial/administrative experience beyond its actual extent', 'ethical_finding': 'Conduct held to be emphasis rather than prohibited exaggeration — condoned under charitable interpretation absent prior precedent', 'code_section': 'Section 3(e) — prohibition on listing for employment using exaggerated statements of qualifications'}
Engineer Doe, whose aerospace specialty had dried up during an industry unemployment crisis, embellished and strongly emphasized the extent and level of his managerial and administrative technical experience on employment applications in order to secure new employment, raising the question of whether such emphasis constitutes a prohibited 'exaggeration' under Section 3(e) of the Code of Ethics.
{'type': 'applicant_to', 'target': 'Prospective Engineering Employer'}
{'type': 'subject_of', 'target': 'NSPE Code Section 3(e) Analysis'}
Resume Misrepresenting Job-Seeking Engineer
Doe could truthfully show some degree of competence in the managerial and administrative technical area
Doe Prolonged Unemployment and Career Transition Pressure
From layoff through many months of unsuccessful job search until new position secured
Prospective employers in management/administration roles
Along with thousands of other engineers in the aerospace industry, he was laid off when contracts with his company were terminated
John Doe's employment situation following aerospace industry layoff
Securing new employment through reframed resume
After being turned down repeatedly for technical managerial or administrative positions
he was advised by an employment counselor that his only opportunity lay in finding a position involving management and administration of engineering work
Mass layoff when aerospace contracts terminated and new work was not forthcoming
First Ethics Board Ruling on Code Section 3(e) Exaggeration-Emphasis Boundary
From initiation of this case through issuance of the board's ruling
In the absence of any previous decisions on this section of the code
Previously Reserved Ethical Question Definitively Resolved State
Ethics board's interpretive posture toward Code Section 3(e) prohibition on exaggerated qualification statements
Board's holding that 'exaggerated' applies only to deliberate untruths, not to emphasis on degree of experience
We hold that the word 'exaggerated' in the code applies only to deliberate untruths of the facts of former employment rather than the emphasis placed on the degree of experience or other qualifications
Absence of any previous decisions on Code Section 3(e) combined with Doe's case requiring a definitive ruling
Doe Third Party Career Advisor Non-Absolution Employment Counselor Aerospace
An employment counselor advised Doe that his only opportunity lay in management roles, which contributed to his decision to restructure his resume to emphasize managerial experience. The board's analysis did not treat this advice as a defense or mitigating factor sufficient to excuse any ethics violation.
John Doe (Resume Misrepresenting Job-Seeking Engineer)
Third-Party Career Advisor Non-Absolution Resume Honesty Obligation
Doe remained personally responsible for the ethical accuracy of his resume notwithstanding the employment counselor's advice that management roles were his only opportunity; reliance on the counselor's guidance did not transfer or diminish Doe's professional ethical responsibility for his qualification representations.
At the time of resume preparation following the employment counselor's advice
Doe Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Resume Honesty Aerospace Unemployment
Doe experienced genuine economic distress during the aerospace unemployment crisis, and an employment counselor advised him that management roles were his only opportunity. The board acknowledged these circumstances but evaluated his conduct against the ethics code regardless.
Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Resume Misrepresentation Prohibition Obligation
Doe's genuine economic hardship — prolonged unemployment following aerospace industry layoffs and the drying-up of his technical specialty — did not excuse or justify any misrepresentation on his resume; the board acknowledged the hardship as contextual background but did not treat it as a defense to the ethics inquiry.
Throughout the period of Doe's unemployment and resume preparation
Economic Hardship Non-Excuse For Professional Misrepresentation Invoked By Doe Circumstances
Doe's economic circumstances as potential mitigating or excusing factor
Benevolent Motive Does Not Cure Ethical Violation
Doe's prolonged unemployment following industry-wide aerospace layoffs, combined with repeated rejections and an employment counselor's advice that misrepresentation was his 'only opportunity,' constitutes the paradigm case of economic hardship invoked as context for professional misrepresentation; the principle establishes that this hardship, however genuine and sympathetic, does not excuse the ethical violation
The case presents the strongest possible version of the economic hardship argument — industry-wide unemployment crisis, many months of failed job search, professional advice that misrepresentation was the only path — yet the principle holds that even these circumstances do not cure the ethical violation, though they may be relevant to proportionality of any sanction
Ethics Code Provision Teleological Scope Limitation Applied to Section 3(e)
Interpretation of NSPE Code Section 3(e) prohibition on exaggerated qualification statements
Ethics Code Expansive Interpretation Canon
Ethics Code Standard Erosion Prevention Principle
The board interpreted the scope of Section 3(e)'s prohibition on 'exaggerated statements' by reference to the provision's protective purpose — preventing employers from being deceived about an engineer's competence to make important engineering decisions — and held that conduct not implicating that purpose (emphasis on genuine experience) fell outside the provision's reach
In the absence of prior precedent, the board used the provision's harm-prevention purpose as the primary interpretive guide, limiting the provision's scope to conduct that actually risks the harm the provision was designed to prevent
Ethics Code Provision Teleological Scope Limitation Principle
Intentional Deception Versus Inadvertent Inaccuracy Distinction Applied to Doe Resume
Doe's resume characterization of the balance between managerial and technical experience
Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition
The board distinguished between deliberate untruths of facts of former employment (which would constitute prohibited exaggeration) and the degree of emphasis placed on genuine qualifications (which does not), holding that Doe's conduct fell into the latter category because he could truthfully claim some competence in the emphasized area
The ethics code prohibition on exaggeration targets deliberate fabrication of facts, not the emphasis placed on truthful experience; the intent element distinguishes permissible favorable framing from prohibited deception
Pertinent Fact Misrepresentation Intent-and-Purpose Dual-Element Test Applied To Doe
Doe's resume misrepresentation of managerial experience scope
Both elements of the dual-element test are satisfied in Doe's case: (1) the balance of managerial versus technical experience is a pertinent fact — clearly and decisively relevant — to a prospective employer's decision to hire for a management role; and (2) Doe acted with deliberate intent and purpose to enhance his apparent qualifications by suppressing his technical identity and inflating his managerial profile
The dual-element test confirms the ethical violation: the misrepresented information (managerial experience level) was pertinent to the employer's hiring decision, and Doe's deliberate 'devising' of the new resume establishes the requisite intent and purpose to enhance his apparent qualifications
Pertinent Fact Misrepresentation Intent-and-Purpose Dual-Element Test
Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition Invoked By Doe Resume
Doe's resume representations about managerial experience
Doe's resume likely contained no outright false statements — he did have some managerial and administrative experience — but the selective framing created a materially false impression that his primary professional identity was managerial rather than technical, violating the principle that the overall impression conveyed must be truthful
The ethical standard extends beyond literal truth to the overall impression; Doe's 'minor' managerial experience was presented as 'an important responsibility,' which is a framing choice designed to exploit the literal accuracy of the underlying fact while creating a false overall impression of his career profile
Permissible emphasis requires that the overall portrait correspond to actual experience; characterizing minor responsibilities as 'important' when they were acknowledged to be minor crosses into the prohibited category of technically-true-but-misleading representation
Contextual Resume Emphasis Permissibility Principle Invoked As Potential Defense
Doe's claim that he had genuine managerial experience worth emphasizing
Doe might argue that his resume merely emphasized a genuine — if minor — aspect of his actual experience, which is permissible under the principle that engineers may present qualifications in their most favorable truthful light; however, this defense fails because the emphasis was not merely favorable framing but a systematic suppression of primary expertise combined with inflation of minor responsibilities
The permissibility principle requires absence of material deception as to actual competence; Doe's strategy crossed this threshold because the employer hired him based on a false impression of his primary professional identity, not merely a favorable but accurate presentation
Doe Employment Seeking Resume Omission Materiality Self-Assessment Failure
The omission of the dominant technical character of Doe's twelve-year career was material: prospective employers were selecting for management competence, and the true balance of Doe's experience was directly relevant to that selection decision.
Employment-Seeking Resume Omission Materiality Self-Assessment Obligation
John Doe was obligated to assess whether the systematic de-emphasis of twelve years of technical design experience on his resume rose to the level of material misrepresentation — recognizing that a reasonable prospective employer seeking a management engineer would consider the actual proportion of technical versus managerial experience highly significant — and to refrain from submitting a resume that omitted or obscured this material context.
he had been assigned to the performance of highly technical and complex engineering design work
At the time of preparing the revised resume
Doe had had some managerial and administrative experience of a minor nature
Doe Genuine Competence Prerequisite Managerial Emphasis Aerospace Resume
Doe emphasized managerial experience on his resume to seek management-track aerospace positions. The board's finding that this was permissible emphasis rather than prohibited exaggeration rested critically on the fact that Doe genuinely possessed some managerial competence — the emphasis had a real, if minor, foundation.
Genuine Competence Prerequisite for Permissible Resume Emphasis Obligation
Doe was obligated to ensure that his strong emphasis on managerial and administrative technical experience was grounded in genuine, if limited, actual competence in that area; the board found this condition satisfied because Doe could truthfully show some degree of competence in the managerial area, even though he strongly emphasized its extent and level beyond what his experience warranted.
Doe Selective Emphasis Competence Deception Boundary Managerial Resume Aerospace
The board applied the competence-deception boundary test and found Doe's conduct permissible because the employer was not deceived as to whether Doe possessed any managerial competence — only as to the degree of that competence relative to his technical experience.
Selective Emphasis Competence-Deception Boundary Compliance Obligation
Doe was obligated to ensure that his selective emphasis of managerial qualifications did not cross into deceiving the prospective employer about his actual competence for the management role; the board found the boundary was not crossed because Doe genuinely possessed some managerial competence, even though he strongly emphasized its extent.
Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Acknowledged But Contextually Mitigated in Doe Case
Doe's decision to embellish resume qualifications during aerospace industry unemployment crisis
The board acknowledged Doe's genuine economic distress (aerospace unemployment crisis, dried-up specialty) as factual context but did not treat it as an ethical excuse; instead, the board found no violation on the independent ground that the conduct did not constitute 'exaggeration' within the code's meaning — the economic hardship context informed the charitable interpretation but did not itself justify the conduct
Economic hardship provides contextual background that may inform a charitable interpretive posture, but it does not independently excuse conduct that would otherwise constitute an ethics code violation; the board's charitable interpretation was grounded in the nature of the conduct (emphasis vs. fabrication), not in the economic circumstances
his field of technical expertise having 'dried up' during the aerospace unemployment crisis.
we are inclined to the more charitable view that his action can be condoned as something less than an 'exaggeration'
Implication-as-Misrepresentation Invoked By Doe Resume Framing
Structural and framing choices in Doe's revised resume
Doe's resume implied, through structural presentation choices — downplaying technical work, foregrounding managerial responsibilities, characterizing minor functions as 'important' — that his primary professional identity and experience base was managerial rather than technical, when the opposite was true; this implication-based misrepresentation is ethically equivalent to an affirmative false statement
The ethical prohibition extends to strategic omissions and framing choices that create false impressions; Doe's decision to 'play down' twelve years of primary expertise while 'emphasizing' minor responsibilities as 'important' is precisely the type of implication-based misrepresentation this principle targets
Implication-as-Misrepresentation in Professional Qualification Documents
Doe Economic Hardship Non-Excuse Resume Misrepresentation
Doe experienced genuine economic hardship — laid off along with thousands of other aerospace engineers, unemployed for many months, repeatedly rejected. Despite this, the ethics obligation of honest qualification representation remained binding and was not excused by his circumstances.
John Doe was obligated to refrain from misrepresenting his qualifications on his resume notwithstanding his genuine economic hardship arising from industry-wide aerospace layoffs, prolonged unemployment, and repeated rejection by prospective employers; his difficult circumstances did not suspend or override his professional obligation of honesty in qualification representations.
Throughout the period of unemployment and resume revision
Doe Resume Implication-Based Role Misrepresentation Prohibition
Doe's revised resume likely contained no outright false statements — he did have some managerial experience — but the deliberate structural framing created a false impression of his qualification profile for management roles.
Resume Implication-Based Misrepresentation Prohibition Obligation
John Doe was obligated to refrain from structuring his resume in a manner that implied, through selective framing and strategic de-emphasis, that his primary professional identity and experience was managerial and administrative rather than technical design, when in fact twelve years of technical design work constituted the dominant substance of his career.
At the time of preparing and submitting the revised resume
Doe Third-Party Career Advisor Non-Absolution Resume Honesty
Doe's employment counselor advised that his 'only opportunity' lay in management roles, implicitly or explicitly encouraging the resume strategy. Doe implemented the strategy, but the counselor's advice does not constitute a defense to the resulting ethics violation.
John Doe was obligated to independently evaluate the ethical permissibility of his revised resume strategy and to refrain from implementing a misrepresentation strategy even when advised to do so by an employment counselor, recognizing that the counselor's non-engineer advice did not transfer or extinguish Doe's personal professional ethical responsibility for the accuracy of his qualification representations.
At the time of receiving the employment counselor's advice and deciding to implement the revised resume strategy
Deliberate Untruth Threshold Applied to Doe Qualification Representation
Doe's resume statements about managerial and administrative aerospace experience
The board held that Doe's conduct — strongly emphasizing the extent and level of genuine managerial experience — did not constitute 'exaggeration' within the ethics code because it did not involve deliberate untruths about the facts of his former employment, only emphasis on the degree of experience he genuinely possessed
The threshold for an ethics code exaggeration violation requires affirmative fabrication of facts; emphasis on genuine experience, even if the extent is overstated in degree, does not cross this threshold provided some actual competence exists in the emphasized area
Deliberate Untruth Threshold for Qualification Exaggeration Violation
Doe could truthfully show some degree of competence in the managerial and administrative technical area of the employment, even though he strongly emphasized its extent and level.
Doe Selective Emphasis Competence-Deception Boundary Violation
Doe emphasized minor managerial experience to overcome repeated rejections, but the emphasis crossed the permissibility boundary by creating a false impression of managerial competence he did not genuinely possess at the level implied.
John Doe was obligated to ensure that any selective emphasis of his managerial qualifications remained within the permissible zone — i.e., that it did not deceive the prospective employer as to his actual competence for the management role sought — and was prohibited from crossing into misrepresentation by implying a level of managerial competence and experience that his minor administrative functions did not genuinely support.
At the time of preparing and distributing the revised resume
Honesty in Professional Representations Violated By Doe
Doe's professional qualification representations to prospective employers
Third-Party Career Advisor Non-Absolution of Engineer Ethical Responsibility
Doe's core professional virtue obligation of honesty required him to represent his qualifications accurately to prospective employers; by systematically misrepresenting the balance of his technical versus managerial experience, he violated this foundational professional virtue
Honesty in professional representations is not merely about avoiding outright falsehoods but about ensuring that the overall picture conveyed to those who rely on professional self-representations — here, prospective employers making hiring decisions — is accurate and not misleading
Third-Party Career Advisor Non-Absolution Invoked By Employment Counselor Advice
Employment counselor's role in advising Doe's resume strategy
The employment counselor's advice that Doe's 'only opportunity' lay in management roles — which implicitly or explicitly encouraged the resume strategy he adopted — does not transfer ethical responsibility for the resulting misrepresentation from Doe to the counselor; Doe remains personally accountable for the truthfulness of his own professional representations
The counselor's advice may have been well-intentioned and practically sound from a career-market perspective, but it does not constitute an ethical license for misrepresentation; Doe had an independent obligation to evaluate the advice against his professional ethics obligations and refuse to implement it to the extent it required misrepresentation
Doe Pertinent Fact Dual-Element Misrepresentation Test Violation
Doe's revised resume was a calculated strategy — he 'devised' it specifically to overcome repeated rejections — establishing intentionality. The balance of technical versus managerial experience was directly pertinent to the management positions sought.
Pertinent Fact Dual-Element Misrepresentation Test Compliance Obligation
John Doe was obligated to ensure that his resume satisfied both elements of the pertinent-fact misrepresentation test: (1) the balance of managerial versus technical experience is a pertinent fact — directly decisive to a prospective employer's hiring decision for a management role — and (2) Doe's deliberate restructuring of the resume was made with the intent and purpose of enhancing his apparent managerial qualifications beyond what was accurate; both elements being satisfied, the resume constituted a violation of NSPE Code Section II.5.a.
Doe Resume Selective Emphasis Permissibility Boundary Aerospace Management Role
Doe's resume strongly emphasized minor managerial experience while downplaying twelve years of technical design work. The board found this was permissible emphasis rather than prohibited misrepresentation because Doe genuinely possessed some managerial competence and the employer was not deceived as to his competence for the role.
Resume Selective Emphasis Permissibility Boundary Obligation
Doe was obligated to remain within the permissible boundary of selective emphasis on his resume — highlighting genuine qualifications without crossing into misrepresentation — and the board found he remained within that boundary because his emphasis of genuine managerial competence did not deceive the employer as to his actual competence for the management role sought.
At the time of resume preparation and submission during the aerospace unemployment crisis
Resume Selective Emphasis Misrepresentation Invoked By Doe
Doe's job-search resume submitted to aerospace and engineering employers
Doe crafted a resume that strategically downplayed twelve years of technical design experience and elevated minor managerial responsibilities to appear as significant management experience, creating a materially false overall impression of his professional profile without necessarily making any single literally false statement
The ethical standard is not whether each individual line item on the resume is literally accurate, but whether the overall portrait conveyed corresponds to Doe's actual experience; selectively 'playing down' twelve years of primary expertise while 'emphasizing' minor responsibilities as 'important' crosses from permissible favorable framing into material misrepresentation
Doe Employment Role Competence Honest Representation Violation
Doe's twelve years of experience were overwhelmingly technical design; his managerial experience was of a minor nature. His revised resume presented the inverse impression, constituting a material misrepresentation of his role-type qualification balance.
Employment Role Competence Honest Representation Obligation
John Doe was obligated to accurately represent the balance of his technical design versus managerial and administrative experience on his resume so that prospective employers could make informed hiring decisions, and was prohibited from deliberately inverting the apparent weight of those roles to secure a management position for which his resume, as revised, materially misrepresented his qualification profile.
At the time of devising and submitting the revised resume to the aerospace company that ultimately hired him
Contextual Resume Emphasis Permissibility Invoked for Doe's Managerial Experience Emphasis
Doe's resume representation of managerial and administrative aerospace experience
The board held that Doe's strong emphasis on his managerial and administrative technical experience — which he genuinely possessed to some degree — constituted permissible emphasis rather than impermissible exaggeration, because he could truthfully show some competence in the emphasized area and the emphasis did not constitute a deliberate untruth
Permissible emphasis requires that the engineer possess genuine, truthful competence in the emphasized area; the fact that the extent and level were strongly emphasized does not alone constitute a violation where no affirmative falsehood was made
Doe Exaggeration-Emphasis Threshold Determination
During ethics board deliberation on Doe's case
It would be easy to say that his distortion of his experience was an 'exaggeration' of the facts and thus cannot be excused as an ethical matter
Exaggeration-Emphasis Distinction Threshold Determination State
Ethics board's determination of whether Doe's conduct crossed the line from permissible emphasis to prohibited exaggeration under Code Section 3(e)
Board's ruling distinguishing deliberate untruth (prohibited) from emphasis on genuine qualifications (permissible)
We hold that the word 'exaggerated' in the code applies only to deliberate untruths of the facts of former employment
Doe's strong emphasis on managerial/administrative experience combined with first-time interpretation of Code Section 3(e)'s 'exaggerated' standard
Doe Resume Role-Balance Misrepresentation Prohibition
Doe, after prolonged unemployment following aerospace industry layoffs, devised a new resume that played down twelve years of technical design expertise and elevated minor managerial functions to appear as significant responsibilities, in order to qualify for management-track positions.
John Doe was obligated to ensure that his resume accurately represented the balance of his twelve years of technical design experience versus his minor managerial and administrative responsibilities, and was prohibited from deliberately restructuring his resume to invert that balance by downplaying dominant technical experience and elevating minor managerial experience to appear as an important responsibility.
At the time of devising and distributing the revised resume to prospective employers
Doe Exaggeration Threshold Non-Violation Resume Emphasis Aerospace Unemployment Case
Doe, an aerospace design engineer laid off during an industry unemployment crisis, devised a resume that strongly emphasized minor managerial and administrative experience while downplaying twelve years of technical design work, in order to seek management-track positions. The board held this was emphasis rather than exaggeration because Doe genuinely possessed some managerial competence.
Exaggeration Code Provision Deliberate Untruth Threshold Compliance Obligation
Doe was obligated to refrain from making deliberate factual untruths about his prior employment on his resume; his strong emphasis on genuine managerial experience — without fabricating facts — did not constitute a violation of the exaggeration prohibition under Section 3(e), though it approached the boundary.
At the time of resume preparation and submission to prospective employers during the aerospace unemployment crisis
{'specialty': 'Aerospace design engineering', 'years_experience': 12, 'misrepresentation_type': 'Emphasis distortion — inflating minor managerial experience while downplaying dominant technical expertise', 'outcome': 'Successfully obtained new employment through the misleading resume'}
A design engineer with twelve years of aerospace experience who, after being laid off and failing to find work in his specialty, devised a resume that downplayed his technical design expertise and disproportionately emphasized minor managerial and administrative experience in order to obtain a management-track position, raising obligations of honesty and accurate self-representation under professional codes.
{'type': 'advisee_of', 'target': 'Employment Counselor'}
{'type': 'applicant_to', 'target': 'Aerospace Company Hiring Authority'}