Defining and Building the Engineering Workforce of the Future

American Society For Engineering Education, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

To assist higher education programs in adapting their practices to better prepare engineering professionals who thrive in the future workforce, the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) will conduct a two-part workshop series to identify the key competencies required for a future-ready engineering workforce, and the elements of an education action plan that would equip such workforce. This proposal builds on the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) strategic goal of fostering the growth of a more capable and diverse research workforce, advancing the scientific and innovation skills of the nation, as well as the projected impact of the industries of the future such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum science, advanced communication networks/5G, advanced manufacturing and biotechnology. This project will conduct a visioning exercise to identify and disaggregate key competencies with enough specificity so that meaningful change actions in engineering educational programs can be conveyed in a straightforward manner. This multi-stakeholder agenda for action will help develop large numbers of individuals with the engineering skills needed for success in the workplace of the future and increase the capacities of the nation’s engineering workforce. This will help define the startup phase of establishing a sustainable Future-Ready Engineering Ecosystem (FREE) composed of education, policy, and private sector collaborations, that will be necessary to maintain U.S. technological leadership. The objectives of the Future Ready Engineer Ecosystem (FREE) two-part workshop series are two-fold: The first workshop will focus on visioning and definition and the second workshop will focus on operationalization. Specifically, the first workshop will focus on disaggregating key competencies for the future-ready engineering workforce and will identify a prioritized taxonomy of the key competencies with the essential details and context summaries to provide meaningful specificity. This Future-Ready Engineering Ecosystem Competency Taxonomy (FREE-CoT) would then become the desired student outcomes for the second workshop. The second workshop will build upon the outcomes of the first workshop to define what are the specific actions that educators, policymakers, and industry need to take to co-develop a critical mass of emerging engineers with the competencies needed to succeed in the coming years. A framework for the necessary changes in engineering educational programs will be identified along with the required actions to achieve these changes. The framework will also include the essential collaborative processes that must be established across the sectors to achieve the communication and feedback required for ongoing co-development. A rubric will be drafted that defines a threshold of what success looks like for each key competency. This Future-Ready Engineering Ecosystem Framework and Rubric for Action (FREE-FRA) would then provide an easy to communicate vision for a national call to action. 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.