In Turkey, this exists and is in my view indefensible in its current implementation. The software folks are grouped in with the electrical engineers, although the cs people will have their own organization soon by the looks of it. There are very few CS departments that call themselves "Computer Science" instead its called Computer Engineering because of the Turkish bias to anything with word `engineer' in it. A lot of big contracts require companies to have registered engineers, who in turn force their software engineers to register. Once you register you automatically owe them 65 dollars a year from the date you graduated, or a max of 325 dollars for all the previous years, and then 65 a year for every year after that. If you consider how many engineers are walking around, thats a shit load of money ana great con frankly. Without registering you can't claim that you are a software engineer with `x amount of experience' before the law or be called into court to testify as an expert in anything software related or get gov contracts etc.

So what qualifications do you need to have to become a member?

Just cash and a valid diploma. Hell its probably easier to testify as a software expert in court for a member who pays his fees but works as a rug dealer than as a 10+ year network security analyst who isn't a member.

Any academic who supports the current implementation should have their credentials questioned, it defies logic that is attained at a high school level.