CAREER: Ready for Change: Fostering Adaptability along the Engineering Pathway

工程师越来越需要适应不断变化的工作角色、工作期望和行业需求。然而，研究表明，他们努力做到这一点有效地在每一点沿着工程途径。也缺乏共同的语言或最佳实践来明确地教授和评估适应性。该项目通过开发表征，测量和促进适应性的方法来解决这些挑战，并将其作为工程毕业生的关键成果。这些努力的更广泛的影响是更好地理解构成工程实践适应性的能力和最能培养其形成的教育策略。适应性强的工程师将加强美国技术劳动力的经济竞争力。更加强调适应性也有可能提高工程专业的保留率，特别是在代表性不足的群体，如妇女。这个为期五年的项目结合了职业和组织心理学的前沿理论，具有强有力的基础研究方法和实验设计，以批判性地研究工程适应性。首先，半结构化的关键事件访谈与30个早期职业生涯的工程师和15个工程经理正在收集和主题分析开发：（1）一个统一的类型学的适应性思维和专业工程实践所需的行为，和（2）的催化剂和早期职业生涯的工程师的经验，以适应性的障碍的基本理解。这一阶段的工作是专门针对美国半导体设计和制造业的，在这个行业中，产品生命周期越来越短，消费者需求模式迅速变化，使得适应性成为必要。还对女性进行了过度抽样，以检查她们与男性相比所经历的特定性别挑战。从采访的结果将通知设计自我报告和情景判断工具，以衡量工程的适应性，并创建一套公开的在线模块，以提高工程专业学生和早期职业专业人士的适应性。在线模块的有效性将在项目的最后阶段使用延迟治疗随机对照试验与500名一年级和二年级的学生进行经验测试。综合教育计划的重点是在广泛的学习环境中实施模块，并与工程教育工作者，雇主和学生支持人员共同构建教育战略，以更好地支持适应性发展。该项目的成果有助于推进工程教育和专业工程实践之间的一致性，并有助于适应性研究和教育创新的更广泛的议程，跨越工程部门和职业阶段。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

Engineers increasingly need to adapt to changing job roles, work expectations, and industry needs. Yet, research shows that they struggle to do this effectively at every point along the engineering pathway. There is also a lack of shared language or best practices with which to explicitly teach and assess adaptability. This project addresses these challenges by developing the means to characterize, measure, and promote adaptability as a key outcome for engineering graduates. The broader impacts of these efforts are a better understanding of the competencies that constitute adaptability in engineering practice and the educational strategies that best cultivate their formation. Adaptable engineers will strengthen the economic competitiveness of the U.S. technical workforce. A greater emphasis on adaptability also has the potential to improve retention in the engineering profession, particularly among underrepresented groups such as women.This five-year project combines leading-edge theories from vocational and organizational psychology with strongly grounded research methods and experimental design to critically examine adaptability in engineering. First, semi-structured critical incident interviews with thirty early career engineers and fifteen engineering managers are being collected and thematically analyzed to develop: (1) a unified typology of the adaptive mindsets and behaviors necessary for professional engineering practice, and (2) a foundational understanding of the catalysts and barriers that early career engineers experience to being adaptable. This phase of the work is specifically grounded in the U.S. semiconductor design and manufacturing industry, in which increasingly short product lifecycles and rapidly changing consumer demand patterns have made adaptability a necessity. Women are also being oversampled to examine the gender-specific challenges that they experience as compared with men. Findings from the interviews will inform the design self-report and situational judgment instruments to measure adaptability in engineering, and the creation of a set of publicly available online modules to enhance the adaptability of engineering students and early career professionals. The effectiveness of the online modules will be empirically tested using a delayed-treatment randomized-control trial with five hundred first and second-year students during the last phase of the project. An integrated education plan focuses on implementation of the modules in a wide range of learning environments, and on the co-construction of educational strategies with engineering educators, employers, and student-support staff to better support adaptability development. The project outcomes help advance the alignment between engineering education and professional engineering practice and contribute to a broader agenda of adaptability research and educational innovations that spans engineering sectors and career stages.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.