CAREER: Ready for Change: Fostering Adaptability along the Engineering Pathway

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Engineers increasingly need to adapt to changing job roles, work expectations, and industry needs. Yet, research shows that they struggle to do this effectively at every point along the engineering pathway. There is also a lack of shared language or best practices with which to explicitly teach and assess adaptability. This project addresses these challenges by developing the means to characterize, measure, and promote adaptability as a key outcome for engineering graduates. The broader impacts of these efforts are a better understanding of the competencies that constitute adaptability in engineering practice and the educational strategies that best cultivate their formation. Adaptable engineers will strengthen the economic competitiveness of the U.S. technical workforce. A greater emphasis on adaptability also has the potential to improve retention in the engineering profession, particularly among underrepresented groups such as women. This five-year project combines leading-edge theories from vocational and organizational psychology with strongly grounded research methods and experimental design to critically examine adaptability in engineering. First, semi-structured critical incident interviews with thirty early career engineers and fifteen engineering managers are being collected and thematically analyzed to develop: (1) a unified typology of the adaptive mindsets and behaviors necessary for professional engineering practice, and (2) a foundational understanding of the catalysts and barriers that early career engineers experience to being adaptable. This phase of the work is specifically grounded in the U.S. semiconductor design and manufacturing industry, in which increasingly short product lifecycles and rapidly changing consumer demand patterns have made adaptability a necessity. Women are also being oversampled to examine the gender-specific challenges that they experience as compared with men. Findings from the interviews will inform the design self-report and situational judgment instruments to measure adaptability in engineering, and the creation of a set of publicly available online modules to enhance the adaptability of engineering students and early career professionals. The effectiveness of the online modules will be empirically tested using a delayed-treatment randomized-control trial with five hundred first and second-year students during the last phase of the project. An integrated education plan focuses on implementation of the modules in a wide range of learning environments, and on the co-construction of educational strategies with engineering educators, employers, and student-support staff to better support adaptability development. The project outcomes help advance the alignment between engineering education and professional engineering practice and contribute to a broader agenda of adaptability research and educational innovations that spans engineering sectors and career stages. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.