Nowadays, employees have to take a more flexible and proactive approach to their working lives, involving the continuous management of their own employability, to meet the challenges of a global economy characterised by rapid change (Tomlinson 2007). Higher education institutions increasingly acknowledge their responsibility to guide students, both in their academic growth and in their career development (Burke et al. 2017; National Academy of Engineering 2018).Consequently, the educational field is challenged to explicitly trigger students' reflection on their professional future. Narrow view on engineeringIn engineering education, students' perceptions of their professional future is a focus that deserves due attention. Research indicates that, even close to graduation, many engineering students remain ABSTRACT It is recognised that engineers end up in a wide variety of engineering positions and that the importance of professional competencies might vary accordingly. However, most studies regarding professional competencies, employability or career guidance fail to address this variety in professional roles. This systematic literature review aims to identify professional roles for early career engineers and explores the defining attributes. Twentyfour publications were selected for inclusion by screening and appraising results obtained from three databases. Three frameworks that fulfilled the analysing criteria described similar roles focusing on innovation, optimisation and customisation. The majority of studies investigated professional competencies as identifying attributes, but inconsistency in and a lack of definitions hindered to determine the distinct professional competencies per role. Further research is recommended to identify role attributes and to investigate how a professional roles framework can support career development in engineering education, more particular in creating professional and self-awareness.
This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a 23 item Situational Judgement Test (SJT) with scenarios tailored to the engineering profession. The SJT was developed around the PREFER model, with the support of professional engineers and academics in 11 panel discussions. In total 53 engineering professionals and academics were consulted during the development of both the item stems and the item responses of the SJT. Subsequently, the SJT was rolled out to 334 final year and masters students enrolled in engineering programmes at TU Dublin and KU Leuven respectively. After taking part in the test, students were sent automated reports on their performance and the test which highlighted how their response compared to a response gathered from a professional engineer with feedback on how they might improve their competence in a particular area, while also commending their performance in other areas. The results of this study highlight that 8 SJT items had significantly lower mean scores when compared with the test-mean. These items, which were related to perseverance, client focus, vision, planning and organising, solution orientation, team player, work organisation, clear communication and networking all represent potential competence deficits in the population of final year and master students that were tested. This work adds to engineering education scholarship by providing an engineering-specific SJT that enables educators to identify areas of relative strength and weakness in students’ professional judgements in order to better prepare them for their future careers.
Professional competencies vary across engineering job characteristics. The design of the educational environment should take into account this diversity and enable students to develop career awareness. The European project PREFER (Professional Roles and Employability for Future EngineeRs) has developed instruments to make engineering students aware of the existence of professional roles and their associated competency profiles. These are designed and validated in strong interaction with industry, guaranteeing a discipline-independent, future-proof framework that is ready to implement in the engineering curriculum. In this paper, we describe the integration of this framework in the Faculty of Engineering Technology of KU Leuven, Belgium. The selection of professional competencies based on professional roles, the adaptive level of the professional competencies thanks to electives and the collaborative assessment of the students by experts in professional competencies and experts in technological competencies, are key elements of the new engineering curriculum. All of them are developed thanks to a university-business collaboration. The reformed curriculum will start from the academic year 2020-2021.
The shortage of engineering talent leads to a loss in economic output. This shortagecombat has to be fought on several fronts, one of them is attracting and retaining more currently underrepresented students. This paper discusses the need to improve a sense of belonging and to increase professional awareness, or the understanding of the different roles an engineer can take on, in order to increase diversity in engineering. Based on an extensive literature review an overview is given of previous research on this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective. Research has shown that professional identity development has high impact on persistence and study success. Although identity development is a hot topic in engineering education research, several studies indicate that engineering students still have difficulties in grasping what it is to be an engineer and often fall back upon the rather stereotypical, harsh technological, male image. However, research also shows that it is important for students to know what to expect and value in order to develop feelings of belonging or fit. The former European project PREFER has developed promising tools in this regard. However, these tools have not been tested regarding inclusiveness. The paper also outlines the next steps that will be taken by the authors as part of an interdisciplinary project URGENT to increase attractiveness and retention of underrepresented groups in engineering education. This URGENT project proceeds on the outcomes of the PREFER project and will focus on the attraction and retention of female students and students with a migration background.
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