Background: To prepare engineers who can address complex sociotechnical problems, a deep understanding of engineers' complex problem-solving approaches is needed. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study operationalizes comprehensive systems thinking as an analysis framework that attends to aspects of engineering work and relationships among those aspects.…

Professional skills have long been perceived as lacking in junior engineers. Adopting a social realist theoretical framework of knowledge in practice, a hypothesis-based survey study of early career engineers' perceptions of engineering expertise was conducted. It investigated a professional skills readiness difference between initial career…

Contribution: This article provides an examination of changes in first-year engineering students' perceptions of the role of an engineer after completing the Engineers Without Borders Challenge. Background: Essential pre- and post-comparisons missing in existing studies on the Challenge are provided, as well as comparison to other first-year…

With rising job vacancies and a workforce and society that are aging, the United States already has a reservoir of human capital that is not fully tapped: The millions of U.S.-born and immigrant college graduates who are in jobs requiring no more than a high school credential or who are unemployed. This human capital, if well leveraged, could…

Internationally, challenges were raised towards engineering education concerning the industry's widespread questioning of the lack of practical skills of engineering graduates. Scholars in engineering educational research have tried to better understand professional engineers' practices so as to inform engineering education. Concerning the lack of…

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…

Community colleges are the leader in facilitating career and technical education (CTE) and workforce development (WD) programs. However, employers who hire recent graduates of these programs question the quality of the education provided. This qualitative study used a focus group comprised of manufacturing and engineering professionals in Florida…

The authors of this report aim to understand the health of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and labor market in the Appalachia region -- defined as the intersection of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia -- with a focus on the mining and extraction industry. This report is the third in a three-part series.…

This study examined how a technical college can best meet the needs of engineering technology-based employers to address the current workforce gap. The study also explored what engineering technology-based employers see as the largest skills gaps in the current workforce, as well as how a technical college can address the concerns. Using a…

This second of five annual reports focuses on employment and wages in energy and advanced manufacturing-related industries and on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education indicators in the Appalachia Partnership Initiative (API) region, comprising twenty-seven counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Together,…

Examination of the transition of successful students from university into the labour market reveals a significant gap between the competencies acquired during higher education and those needed in the workplace. In this article, the authors discuss a research study undertaken to analyse the employability traits of engineers who had recently…

Workers with training in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are in high demand in the United States and are essential to innovation and economic growth. Apprenticeship is a proven strategy for training workers, but it is underutilized in STEM occupations. This report explores employers' experiences with STEM apprenticeship.…

This paper aims at comparing the soft skills required by Moroccan employers to those developed in engineering schools in order to improve engineers' employability. On the one hand, soft skills needed for the job market integration are defined using a mixed method belonging to sequential exploratory design. On the other hand, educational curricula…

This paper is positioned at the junction between the requirements of the manufacturing industry for a significantly increased number of professionally registered engineers in the UK employment pool and the excellent work which is ongoing in and around the education sector to encourage more young people to follow a career in this field. Higher…

Paul Ryan has brought together the writings of the most prominent British research into vocational preparation in Britain in comparison to the other advanced economies, primarily within the EEC. The book, originally published in 1991, documents various aspects of inadequacy in British practice at the time, concentrating upon intermediate skills,…