[jiggy2011]

This depends a great deal on jurisdiction, in the UK there are many jobs with titles of "X engineer" which would more accurately be described as "X technician" or "X operator".

In places which more rigorously enforce titles it is usually down to a professional body to set requirements, though even then these tend to not mandate a degree (though that makes the path smoother). For example the IEEE requires either an IEEE accredited degree or 6 years of proven work experience in a relevant field to achieve member status.

In the UK we have a institution for IT professionals (The British Computer Society) though as far as I can tell nobody really cares much about it.

[noir_lord]

Lots of the people I've worked with that I've respected have been members of the IEEE they seem to have quite a few programmers and all the ones I've met have been excellent.

Even met one of these once http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_Software_Development_... he was a scarily good software engineer.