Exploring professional roles for early career engineers: a systematic literature review

ABSTRACT

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 identify professional roles for early career engineers and explores the defining attributes. Twenty-four publications were selected for inclusion by screening and appraising results obtained from three databases. Three frameworks that fulfilled the analysing criteria described similar roles focusing on innovation, optimisation and customisation. The majority of studies investigated professional competencies as identifying attributes, but inconsistency in and a lack of definitions hindered to determine the distinct professional competencies per role. Further research is recommended to identify role attributes and to investigate how a professional roles framework can support career development in engineering education, more particular in creating professional and self-awareness.

KEYWORDS:

• employability
• professional skills
• skills mismatch
• job-fit
• career guidance
• systematic review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union: [Grant Agreement 575778-EPP-1-2016-1-BE-EPPKA2-KA] and is part of the PREFER project (http://www.preferproject.eu/).

Notes on contributors

Sofie Craps

Sofie Craps is a doctoral researcher at the KU Leuven Faculty of Engineering Technology (Belgium) and a member of the Study Guidance Research Group of the Leuven Engineering & Science Education Centre (LESEC). In 2006, she started to work as a recruitment officer at KU Leuven, focusing on study guidance and science communication and became the communications officer of the KU Leuven Faculty of Engineering Technology. Since then she has provided career guidance to Masters’ students and has been teaching communication skills to engineers. Since 2017, she is actively involved in the European PREFER project (Professional Roles and Employability of Future Engineers, www.preferproject.eu).

Maarten Pinxten

Maarten Pinxten, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the Faculty of Engineering Technology of KU Leuven. His main research interests focus on the academic self-concept and educational decision-making. More recently, he investigates starting competences for first-year students in the STEM field and labour market orientation of engineering graduates.

Heidi Knipprath

Heidi Knipprath is currently working as a Research Expert at HIVA, the Research Institute for Work and Society of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. She obtained a Ph.D. degree in behavioural and social sciences from the University of Groningen, Netherlands. She is specialized in educational effectiveness and school-to-work transitions.

Greet Langie

Greet Langie is since 2012 the vice dean of education of the Faculty of Engineering Technology at KU Leuven (Belgium). She is professor and a board member of SEFI (www.sefi.be) and LESEC (the Leuven Engineering and Science Education Centre (www.set.kuleuven.be/LESEC)). The focus of her research is the transition of STEM-students from secondary education to higher education and the transition from higher education to professional life. She is the promotor of two European projects: readySTEMgo (www.fet.kuleuven.be/readystemgo) and PREFER (www.preferproject.eu).