How engineers perceive the importance of ethics in Finland

ABSTRACT

Success in complex and holistic engineering practices requires more than problem-solving abilities and technical competencies. Engineering education must offer proficient technical competences and also train engineers to think and act ethically. A technical ‘engineering-like’ focus and demand have made educators and students overlook the importance of ethical awareness and transversal competences. Using two Finnish surveys, conducted in 2014 and 2016, we examine how engineers perceive working life needs regarding ethics. The data consider different age groups. We research whether an engineer’s age affects their perception of the importance of ethics in their work and if there are differences between young experts and young managers in their use of ethics within work. The results indicate that practising engineers do not consider ethical issues important in their work. This especially applies to younger engineers; the older an engineer, the more important they consider ethics. No statistically significant difference was found between young engineering experts and managers.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• ethical awareness
• engineering education

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful feedback from Dr K. Kimppa and Dr M. Apiola concerning the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ville Taajamaa is a doctoral candidate at the University of Turku, Finland. His dissertation has been approved in February 2017. The dissertation is based on a university-level engineering education reform in a Nordic multidisciplinary university. The main focus in the action-based research was to create a new model for global interdisciplinary engineering education: O-CDIO where emphasis is in the first phases of the engineering process. He received his M.Sc. from Teknillinen Korkeakoulu (Nowadays Aalto University), has extensive entrepreneurial background and is currently a member in the Design Entrepreneurship Studio research team in Stanford University, Mechanical Engineering.

Anne-Maarit Majanoja is a doctoral candidate at the University of Turku, Finland. She received her M.Sc. in the Department of Information Technology at the University of Turku. She has more than a decade of work experience and her work experience has equipped her with an in-depth knowledge of global IT development and services, quality management, leadership, and logistics and supply chain environments. Her current research interests include quality management, education and ethics, process development, leadership and change management, IT development and services, and outsourcing.

Diana Bairaktarova is an Assistant Professor in Engineering Education at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She holds an MS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria, an MBA from Hamline School of Business, St. Paul, Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University. Bairaktarova’s ongoing research interests span from engineering to psychology to learning sciences, as she uncovers how individual performance and professional decisions are influenced by aptitudes and abilities, personal interests, and manipulation of humanly made objects. Diana has over 15 years of experience working as a Design and Manufacturing Engineer.

Antti Airola, Ph.D., is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in scientific conferences and journals, and won several international research competitions/challenges. His research interests include both basic and applied research in statistical data analysis, with focus on regularised kernel methods.

Tapio Pahikkala received his doctoral degree in 2008 and his associate professorship in 2016. He has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed international journals, conference proceedings and book chapters with more than 1000 citations. In addition, he has given multiple national and international invited talks and lectures about his research topics covering theory and algorithmics of machine learning.

Erkki Sutinen received his Ph.D. in Computer Science (string algorithms) from the University of Helsinki in 1998. Before joining the Department of Information Technology, University of Turku, where he leads Interaction Design, Sutinen established the edTech^delta research group at the then University of Joensuu in 1999. Sutinen’s research is oriented towards designing creative technologies for real-life challenges in a sustainable way, as a co-design process in the relevant cultural context. His current interest is in digital storytelling, applied in terminal care, tourism, and inter-faith dialogue. He has co-supervised almost 30 Ph.Ds, and the portfolio of his externally funded projects is around 6M€.