Mike McMeekin & Kyle Davy
The engineering community faces a grand challenge with respect to its current and future workforce. At a time when ever greater contributions are needed from the engineering community to address societal challenges such as deteriorating infrastructure, climate change, access to clean water, threats to the natural world, the need for better medicines, cybersecurity threats, and the need for more equitable communities, future forces are aligning that could, if not addressed, widen the gap between workforce supply and demand.
Engineering Change Lab – USA’s (ECL) virtual summit on June 18, 2024, explored the nature of this grand challenge in detail, looking at the forces impacting the future workforce supply, identifying key leverage points, and shining the light on innovative strategies being employed now to attract and retain students and workers in the engineering community. Key focus areas of the summit were the need to frame the purpose of engineering as improving the lives of people, emphasizing purpose-driven practice as a key factor in attraction and retention of our future workforce, the imperative of confronting an enrollment cliff facing higher education, and the need to enlarge the circle of our workforce to include those who have traditionally been excluded.
Summit provocateur Dr. Jenna Carpenter, Campbell University and Immediate Past President of the American Society of Engineering Education, set the stage for the discussion by describing the forces that will impact the engineering community workforce.
- The looming demographic cliff in the number of high school graduates in the U.S.
- Declining interest in college.
- Lack of progress in attracting women and under-represented minorities into the engineering community.
Dr. Carpenter stressed the need to reframe engineering education from the historical “weeding out” culture to one of “weaving in.” She also emphasized another needed cultural shift – from focusing on a narrow group of potential students who have enjoyed a wealth of pre-college “opportunity” toward a stance that embraces the “ability” of all potential students with personalized on-ramps and pathways.
She described evidenced-based practices that are necessary for these shifts, starting with changing the messaging regarding what engineering is and what an engineer looks like. Other key practices include holistic advising, support networks, summer bridge programs, engaging students in engineering from Day 1, project-based approaches, skills training, and others. She stressed that these practices are not about lowering standards, but rather setting appropriate expectations and helping all students to meet those expectations.
Two summit provocateurs then provided best-practice case studies of programs that are demonstrating positive results in transforming engineering education and weaving in students. Rebecca Bates described the Integrated Engineering program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, which strives for its students to learn engineering by doing engineering. The program creates a sense of belonging for students and stresses student choice, optimal challenge, and social integration. It also embraces a variety of pathways into engineering education including community colleges, utilizes project- and practice-based approaches through industry partnerships, incorporates students from other disciplines into classes and projects, and focuses on the whole person.
Dr. Olga Pierrakos, Founding Chair of Wake Forest Engineering and Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), described her work in launching the engineering program at Wake Forest and achieving high levels of diversity in both the student and faculty populations. Key elements of her success included recognizing that students want to flourish in all parts of life and focusing curriculum on the ethical responsibilities of engineering to society. Pierrakos also shared important work being done by the NSF imagining a new future for the engineering profession.
Summit participants reflected on the philosophy of “weaving in, not weeding out” in their own education and careers. Important experiences that were highlighted include the following:
- Having support and trust from leadership.
- Career opportunities that expand skill sets beyond technical learning.
- Enlisting HR professionals to push organizational leaders and hiring managers out of their comfort zones in accepting different backgrounds.
- Cultures that foster a sense of belonging and being viewed as a person not a commodity.
- Need to overcome barriers to on-the-job teaching and mentoring.
The concept of purpose-driven practice was explored with a panel of young professionals who are just beginning their careers. ECL Creative Director Kyle Davy interviewed the panel regarding the importance of purpose in shaping their personal choices and their insights regarding purpose-driven practice.
- Sri Yeswanth (Yash) Tadimalla, a Ph.D. student in the College of Computing at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, described his journey to combine his desire to contribute to society with his family’s desire for him to continue his education. His sense of purpose has led him to student leadership roles in United Nations’ initiatives and to focusing his research on how a person’s identity influences their interaction with and learning of technology.
- Lydia El-Sayegh, Executive Fellow with Engineers Without Borders USA, described how she connected her care for people’s well-being and health to bio-medical engineering. She sees her work at EWB as offering the opportunity to have an impact beyond traditional views of engineering. Lydia stressed the need for engineers to “use our witness” to speak about and contribute to global challenges.
- Andrew Rust, graduate student in computer engineering at Columbia University, is also the founder of ByteSize Learning, a company that focuses on technology literacy for children. He founded his company to help answer the question, “Why am I doing this?” He stressed the importance of finding purpose even in the minutiae of engineering.
Anita Cobb, Market Leader of Aviation Equity Strategies at Mead & Hunt, offered a private sector case study of purpose-driven practice. She described Mead & Hunt’s Project Confluence initiative that catapulted the firm’s efforts to address equity in their work. She described how the initiative has impacted multiple aspects of the firm’s operations from marketing to proposals to negotiating scopes of work with clients to project team composition to the integration of purpose into project work. Mead & Hunt describes their purpose as “We shape the future by planning, engineering, engaging, and designing with people first.” Their project philosophy is based on “designing with diversity, planning with inclusion, optimizing social equity, and engineering for environmental justice.”
Two summit provocateurs offered their perspective on how the engineering community can finally move the needle on attracting and retaining women and under-represented minorities in the engineering community. Dr. Jaye Goosby Smith, VP Community Belonging and Chief Diversity Officer at Pepperdine University, offered her experience in building inclusive cultures. Dr. Smith’s research emphasizes the concept of Ubuntic InclusionTM, which, as she describes, “stems from a central tenet of African philosophy, that all human beings are interconnected and interdependent.” The Ubuntic InclusionTM model includes eight key ingredients.
- Connection
- Care
- Intrapersonal Inclusion
- Communication
- Mentoring & Coaching
- Fairness
- Trust
- Visibility & Reward
Dr. Bill Oakes, Director of the EPICS Program at Purdue University, described the importance of locally-based, community-engaged learning in engineering education. The EPICS program seeks to link engineering education and society. Internal educational priorities are to prepare future leaders and connect engineering with societal needs. External societal priorities are to establish long-term partnerships and offer real-world projects that address the needs of the underserved. As much as possible, the program seeks local projects that students will connect with. The program has achieved significant success in attracting women into engineering.
In the final exercise of the summit, participants looked for leverage points across the engineering community to impact the forces that threaten our future workforce. Group discussion centered on three key areas of action. Highlights from the discussion in these areas are summarized below.
- Purpose-driven work.
- Recognition by leaders of the importance of purpose to younger generations.
- Formalizing and communicating purpose in companies.
- Focusing on local projects that benefit people in the communities we live in.
- Messaging regarding the importance of our work in education and in practice. Celebrate impact stories!
- Learning from universities that are emphasizing integrated engineering programs such as Minnesota State Mankato, Purdue, University of San Diego, and others.
- Integrating principles of social entrepreneurship into engineering curriculum such as the KEEN framework.
- Collaboration between universities and companies on capstone projects.
- Embedding company offices in local communities, particularly in disadvantaged areas of communities.
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- Supplementing traditional DEI initiatives with trained external coaches.
- Skilled mentoring.
- Broad-based opportunities for staff input in setting organizational strategies.
- Collaboration with student support organizations outside of the classroom.
- Enlarging the Circle (Attraction and Retention of Women and Under-Represented Minorities).
- Casting a wider net in recruiting.
- Utilizing diverse interview teams.
- Intentionally bringing women into leadership positions such as boards of directors.
- Outreach to community colleges.
- Stressing real-world, community-based projects in outreach to K-12 students.
- Targeted internships that incorporate experiential learning.
Like many issues that we have explored in ECL, solutions to the workforce challenges of the future begin with leadership. Leadership within all sectors of the engineering community needs to recognize the importance of focusing on the purpose of their work as integrally connected to the well-being of people, communities, and the earth. Leadership needs to foster inclusive cultures within our organizations so that we do not lose those who are exploring areas of the engineering community as a career. Finally, leadership needs to prioritize efforts to enlarge the circle of our workforce, embracing women and under-represented minorities and accepting alternative pathways into the workforce. These new aspects of leadership can then allow us to focus on expanding our contributions to mitigate the risks of the 21st century and maintain a high quality of life for future generations. Hopefully, the learning from ECL’s summit can catalyze a commitment to this leadership on behalf of society.
Provocateur presentations and the recording of the summit are available at the Knowledge Hub page of ECL’s website. Look for a full report from the summit in the coming weeks.