Measuring professional skills misalignment based on early-career engineers’ perceptions of engineering expertise

ABSTRACT

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 trajectories (hypothesis 1) through an analysis of engineering expertise perception, and whether this difference decreases over time as engineers mature (hypothesis 2). Both hypotheses were supported by three statistical tests which established the specific nature and size of this difference. Three themes were identified: Academic bias, Technical competence bias, and Rationality bias. Thematic analysis through the framework of these three themes indicates how context and complexity (Semantic dimension) and Knowledge and Knower (Specialisation dimension) were understood in practice. The three themes expressed challenges over these two dimensions in understanding Technical knowledge, Collaboration, and the Legitimate basis for practice, leading to recommendations for education and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional skills
• engineering education
• engineering practice
• Legitimation code theory
• engineering roles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-accrediting-engineering-programs-2020-2021/.

2 https://www.enaee.eu/eur-ace-system/standards-and-guidelines/#standards-and-guidelines-for-accreditation-of-engineering-programmes.

3 Here we mean “course” in the sense of a self-contained unit of learning, a structured number of which constitute a degree program, rather than in the UK sense where “course” means the degree program itself.

4 The student might have less stable required knowledge going into the next course, which obviously can worsen performance, but the requirements put on the student does not change: Courses are (by design) independent environments of educational practice. However, development projects in engineering firms are not.

5 See the broad base of international signatories of the Magna Charta Universitatum, proclaiming academic freedom and institutional autonomy principles for universities: http://www.magna-charta.org/magna-charta-universitatum.

6 The pre-screening resulted in the inclusion of questions 1-4, and 8 into Part I. These were not used in the final analysis, but they have been included in the appendix for transparency.

7 We originally included four extra questions on top of the original twelve in Part II, but these are not used in the final analysis and are not a part of the scoring system which was designed by Trevelyan. They have been included in the appendix for transparency.

8 Specifically misconceptions #1-5, #8, #10-12, and #15 in Trevelyan’s book.

9 See the rightmost column-matrix of table 10 in the appendix for point-distributions for each statement. Trevelyan has made the grading scheme, together with a discussion of its point-distributions, available as an online appendix to his book The making of an expert engineer.

It is downloadable from the publisher under the file name App12-1-Practice Quiz 2 Self-assessment 140807 in a compressed folder found here: https://www.routledge.com/downloads/K24392/K24392_Appendices.zip.

10 The italicized explanations of each theme are directly cited from Trevelyan’s discussion motivating the grading of each of these three statements (P2-1, 5, and 6 in table 10), again found under the file name App12-1-Practice Quiz 2 Self-assessment 140807 at the download-link: https://www.routledge.com/downloads/K24392/K24392_Appendices.zip.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elias Flening

Elias Flening is currently pursuing his PhD at the Division of Mechatronics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He achieved a MSc in Industrial Engineering and Management from KTH in 2014, and has worked as a research assistant at the Stockholm School of Economics. Research interests include engineering design processes, engineering education and project management in the mechatronics domain.

Fredrik Asplund

Fredrik Asplund received his PhD at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2014, has been a Postdoctoral Researcher within the Mobility for Growth programme, and was employed as an Assistant Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2020. Throughout his academic positions he has taught courses in research methodology and supervised students at the master's level. Research interests include system safety, empirical software engineering and engineering education in the Cyber-Physical Systems domains. Dr Asplund is a Marie Curie Fellow and a VINNMER Fellow since his postdoctoral research at Rolls-Royce plc in Derby, UK.

Martin Edin Grimheden

Martin Edin Grimheden is associate professor and dean at the Machine Design department at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Dr Grimheden has a combination of degrees in Engineering and Education. He has been heavily involved in the transition into the BSc/MSc-system at KTH. His current research interest includes studies of learning in higher education, of learning in Mechatronics, and of internationalization of higher education.