This project is a two-year engineering pathways study that is extending research findings from the NSF funded Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education's (CAEE's) Academic Pathways Study (APS). The APS conducted a series of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of undergraduate engineering students' learning experiences and their transition to the workplace. In this project, the experiences of early career professionals (ECPs) are being studied in order to better understand what educational institutions and employers can do to facilitate the transition from engineering student to practicing engineering professional. More specifically, the project is conducting a mixed-method study of two research questions: (1) What factors or combinations of factors facilitate the transition of ECPs into a professional culture, and their conceptions of and preparation for their specific professional careers? (2) How, and to what extent do the factors that influence the professional development of ECPs contribute to their future careers? The proposed research is grounded in social cognitive career theory that has been shown to be a useful framework for exploring engineering career persistence. The project includes a rigorous evaluation plan coordinated by an independent evaluator to monitor the progress of the project and to study evaluation research questions about the integration of the APS results and the impact of collaboration.
Our project represents a collaboration between Stanford University, University of Washington, Purdue University, Colorado School of Mines, and Virginia Tech. Our study is framed around the goal of improving education, based on a comprehensive understanding of the needs/experiences of early career professionals (ECP). We define an ECP as someone who has graduated from an engineering program within five years. It has been well established in studies of adult development that the five-year period post-graduation is a highly formative one for the acquisition of work attitudes, understanding, and motivation across all the professions, including engineering. Yet we know little about ECP in engineering. To develop a more complete picture, we designed the Engineering Pathways Study (EPS). Through EPS we have extended the findings from the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), and in particular findings from CAEE’s multi-method, multi-institutional Academic Pathways Study (APS) research project, where the main focus was engineering student pathways. EPS is a mixed-method, multi-institutional, longitudinal study designed to answer the research questions: What factors or combinations of factors facilitate early career professional’s transition into a professional culture, and their conceptions of and preparation for their specific professional careers? How and to what extent do the factors that influence ECPs’ professional development contribute to their future careers? We incorporated interviews and surveys to generate outcomes that are both rich in description and grounded in statistical measures. We used Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) to frame our study enabling us identify factors from ECPs’ educational preparation and current work environments that influenced early career pathways. In addition to the publications, two significant outcomes from this project include an interview protocol and a survey instrument both of which proved to yield trustworthy, valid and reliable results. The interview protocol is unique in that it is situated in SCCT and draws on specific undergraduate experiences as a means to longitudinally explore current post-graduation experiences. The interview protocol was developed through extensive pilot testing. To insure consistent use by multiple interviews, we also developed an Interviewer’s Guide to facilitate use of the interview questions. A total of 35 ECP participated in interviews. Preliminary interview data analysis directly contributed to the development of the Pathways of Engineering Alumni Research Survey (PEARS) survey. Similar to the interview protocol, the survey development and deployment plans of PEARS included extensive piloting/prototyping of the instrument and forging new ground in working with schools’ alumni organizations for respondent contact information. PEARS was deployed in the fall of 2011 to engineering graduates from 2007 from TPub, LPub, SPri, and MPub resulting in nearly 500 responses (institutional response rates ranging from 16 to 32%, with an overall response rate of 28%). The groups of participants, or Cohorts, that make up EPS are listed below. Along with a description of the Cohort, we include the data collected with each cohort and number of participants. Cohort 1: (TPub, LPub, SPri), 35 ECP’s who were originally part of APS longitudinal study, with data collected through interviews; Cohort 2: (TPub, LPub, SPri, MPub), approx. 500 ECPS’s (2007 Graduates @ 4 schools), with data collected with PEARS Note that TPub, LPub, and SPri are existing institutional pseudonyms from APS. Midwest Public University (MPub) was added for this study. Specific research outcomes from this project include: 1) Qualitative descriptions of and patterns in the career goals of ECP 2) Qualitative descriptions of and patterns in the specific actions ECP take in meeting their goals 3) Qualitative descriptions of and patterns in the relative success of ECP in meeting career goals set as high school seniors 4) Qualitative and quantitative descriptions of and patterns in the career pathways of ECP 5) A specific finding that engineering is not insulated from economic decline despite the reputation as a field with significant financial rewards. Participants experienced both negative and positive impacts. 6) Qualitative and quantitative descriptions of how ECP perceive the work they are undertaking as engineering and non-engineering work 7) Practical recommendations for the logistics of designing a survey deployment plan 8) Quantitative descriptions of the ways participants consider context 9) Qualitative and quantitative descriptions of the ways that skills learned as undergraduates matter in work practice. These findings were presented in a series of publications. To date, publication outcomes from this project include two journal manuscripts under revision, two journal manuscripts currently under review, one journal manuscript in preparation, three book chapters, 13 conference papers/presentations, one completed dissertation and one dissertation in progress. Towards our goal of improving undergraduate education, a final significant outcome includes a series of reports prepared for and presented to stakeholders at each school. Stakeholders include alumni office personnel, advisors at the department, career development staff, as well as university and key administrators at department, college and university levels.
