A curriculum to enhance decision-making skills of technical personnel working in teams

Abstract

Rapidly changing engineering designs and business scenarios make it essential for engineers and technical personnel to be trained to be effective team players and project managers. This paper reports the experiences gained in developing and implementing a workshop to train engineers at a steel manufacturing plant. The objective of the workshop was to foster team-working skills among the participants and to improve the decision-making skills of these engineers so that they could be groomed to take over project management responsibilities. In order to achieve these objectives, a curriculum consisting of personality identification, lectures on engineering and management topics, hands-on exercises using multimedia case studies and feedback sessions was developed. In this paper, the details of developing, implementing and evaluating the curriculum in two three-day workshops are discussed. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation results indicate that the objectives were achieved very well and the curriculum has the potential to help engineers and technical personnel improve their decision-making skills, thereby preparing them to solve the complex technical problems that they will face in their professional lives.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr Sharon Oswald at Auburn University and Dr Karl Smith from the University of Minnesota who worked with us in developing and implementing the modules on project management and strategic planning discussed in this paper. We also thank Glen Olson, Learning Unlimited Corporation, who provided the training on team-working and introduced the DiSC methodology to the authors. In addition, we are thankful to the National Science Foundation for awarding us grants, DUE#9752353, DUE#9950514 and DUE#0089036. These grants were instrumental in enabling us to develop the two case studies used in this workshop. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We thank the Auburn Engineering Technical Assistance Program (AETAP) and the U.S. Steel Works, Fairfield, AL, for financial and logistical support for conducting the workshops discussed in this paper. Please contact www.eng.auburn.edu/aetap for more information on the workshops.