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，他们在工程路线上的每一个点都很难有效地做到这一点。此外，还缺乏共同的语言或最佳做法来明确教授和评估适应性。这个项目通过开发表征、测量和促进适应能力的方法来应对这些挑战，作为工程专业毕业生的一个关键成果。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，以及最好地培养这些能力形成的教育战略。适应能力强的工程师将增强美国技术劳动力的经济竞争力。更多地强调适应性也有可能提高工程专业的留任率，特别是在女性等代表性较低的群体中。这个为期五年的项目将职业和组织心理学的前沿理论与扎实的研究方法和实验设计相结合，以批判性地检查工程学中的适应性。首先，收集了对30名早期职业工程师和15名工程经理的半结构化关键事件访谈，并对其进行主题分析，以开发：(1)专业工程实践所需的适应心态和行为的统一类型学，以及(2)对早期职业工程师在适应方面所经历的催化剂和障碍的基础理解。这一阶段的工作特别植根于美国半导体设计和制造行业，在该行业，产品生命周期越来越短，消费者需求模式迅速变化，因此适应性成为必要。女性也被过度抽样，以检查她们与男性相比所经历的性别挑战。访谈结果将有助于设计自我报告和情境判断工具，以衡量工程方面的适应能力，并创建一套公开提供的在线模块，以增强工程专业学生和早期职业专业人员的适应能力。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对500名一年级和二年级学生进行经验性测试。综合教育计划侧重于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。项目成果有助于促进工程教育和专业工程实践之间的一致性，并有助于跨越工程部门和职业阶段的适应性研究和教育创新的更广泛议程。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.