Background: Engineering education research frequently examines students' persistence (or intentions to persist) into engineering careers from engineering school. However, the variety of engineering-related occupations has increased substantially in recent years, challenging researchers' abilities to discern what constitutes persistence in engineering.Purpose: This article investigates the question: How can researchers categorize students' occupational outcomes in terms of engineering relatedness in a manner that enables consistency across future studies and that is informed by enduring conceptions of engineering work? We develop an occupational outcomes typology in response to this question.Scope/Method: We employed systematic literature reviews to substantiate the typology. In total, we reviewed 259 sources published between 1966 and 2016.Review 1 examined sources discussing or debating the presence of unifying occupational attributes across engineering practice. Review 2 examined sources discussing common job functions constituting unifying criteria identified in Review 1. Review 3 examined sources discussing specific work activities associated with functions identified in Review 2. Finally, Review 4 examined job profile data from the year 2017 on 1100 job titles to identify contemporary nonengineering-titled jobs involving activities similar to activities found in Review 3.Conclusions: Engineering practitioners' possession of design responsibilitytheir responsibility for products' efficacy and safety through governance of designs (new or existing)-has served as a unifying work attribute over time.We find that the 21st century has given rise to interrelated roles encompassing and surrounding conventional engineering work and propose a typology that categorizes occupations in relation to engineering. The typology offers a responsibility-based framing of engineering that helps educators illustrate key distinctions among contemporary engineering-related occupations.

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is an instructor with the Gordon Engineering Leadership (GEL) Program and is a doctoral candidate in the Mechanical Engineering department at MIT. He joined MIT and GEL after nearly a decade in industry as a mechanical engineer and engineering manager in aerospace/defense. His research focuses on engineering workforce development and the college-careers interface.

The 21st century has brought an expansion in the variety of occupational roles associated with product, service, and technological development. As a result, it has become more challenging to assess the occupational choices of engineering graduates over time. This paper introduces an engineering graduates’ occupational outcomes typology designed to facilitate consistency among researchers who employ occupational outcome as a dependent variable in original research, such as in studies of underrepresented groups’ persistence in engineering. The typology is synthesized from the results of a systematic literature review aimed at establishing which work attribute(s) have most consistently united those practicing engineering. The review identifies “design responsibility” – responsibility for the outcomes of design implementation, inclusive of safety, ethicality, and general effectiveness of designs – as an enduring commonality among engineers. Subsequent stages of the review then uncover how this design responsibility has often manifested in engineering practice. Based on the literature review, we present a series of propositions that underpin general definitions of three types of occupational outcomes – engineering work, engineering-related work, and other work – showing how the types can be distinguished based on the nature of design responsibility associated with each. These definitions thus serve as the foundation for a stratified typology of occupations’ engineering-relatedness. We conclude by discussing how utilization of this stratified approach for measuring engineering graduates’ occupational outcomes can enhance transparency and consistency among studies that examine such outcomes. By building the typology upon a distilled notion of fundamental job responsibility, rather than upon job titles, it is our hope that the typology can serve in a meaningful, enduring occupational benchmarking capacity as new job titles, role formulations, or entire technology areas, come and go.

is an Instructional Developer with the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program. Her current interests are project-based learning, simulations involving leadership scenarios, and the intersection of technology and education.