Becoming Boundary Spanning Engineers: Research Methods and Preliminary Findings

Abstract

A growing body of evidence suggests that practicing engineers are increasingly expected to act as boundary spanners who can participate in and manage diverse local and global teams, translate competing stakeholder demands into effective design solutions, and leverage expert knowledge from multiple fields and specialties. The larger project represented by this paper responds to this reality by proposing boundary spanning as a core meta-attribute for engineering students and early career professionals. This paper more specifically offers a detailed description of the study design for a major phase of this research project that involves conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews about boundary spanning experiences with more than two dozen early career engineers in the manufacturing, construction, and electronics industries. To keep the scope of the present account more manageable, this paper provides a preliminary window onto our findings. We utilize a single case approach with a focus on three themes emerging from our analysis of two interviews with one research subject. Namely, we discuss transitions from school to internships to full-time job, the social aspects of engineering practice, and the emotional and psychological dimensions of professional work. One leading objective for this paper is to explore the utility of investigating the realities of engineering work through the lens of an overarching meta-attribute such as boundary spanning. We also propose that our findings provide valuable glimpses of engineering practice that might benefit students who are studying or considering studying engineering. This paper may additionally appeal to educators and researchers who are interested in qualitative methods and/or empirical studies of professional practice.

Boundary Spanning and Engineering: A Qualitative Systematic Review

“…Building on the results presented here, our research team is currently collecting interview and reflection data from early career engineers in multiple industry sectors, including students who have held multiple intern or co-op positions and professionals in the first 1-3 years of full-time work. The data from this phase of the study will allow us to identify the most prevalent boundary spanning roles, activities, and competencies associated with early career engineering practice (Jesiek et al, 2016;Jesiek et al, 2017).…”

“…This study is part of a larger multiphase research study on boundary spanning in engineering. In previous conference papers, we reported on work carried out to date, including an overview of our qualitative systematic review approach (Jesiek, Mazzurco, Trellinger, & Ramane, 2015) and our preliminary findings from a parallel study of boundary spanning experiences among early career engineers (Jesiek, Trellinger, & Mazzurco, 2016;Jesiek, Trellinger, & Nittala, 2017). Here, we offer a detailed description of our methods, following the guidelines for qualitative systematic reviews (Grant & Booth, 2009) and based on the PRISMA framework (Moher et al, 2009), used here because it provides a well-established and rigorous approach to conducting literature reviews (Borrego et al, 2014).…”

Exploring scenario‐based assessment of students' global engineering competency: Building evidence of validity of a China‐based situational judgment test

“…Previous works have suggested that there is a disconnect between university and industry environments (Stevens et al, 2014; Walther & Radcliffe, 2007), resulting in engineers who are not adequately prepared to successfully collaborate in developing solutions to complex problems. Research focused on characterizing engineering work has explored the types of problems faced in the engineering workforce, how working with people is a part of engineering practice, and the boundaries that engineers must negotiate in their work (Jesiek et al, 2016; Stevens et al, 2014; Trevelyan, 2010). Specific to GEC, case studies and interviews have been analyzed to understand the types of global situations faced by working engineers (Jesiek et al, 2015; Jesiek, Zhu, et al, 2014).…”

Interns in the Wild: Using Structured Reflection and Interviews to Investigate Early Career Engineering Practice

“…An overview of this data analysis process, as well as some preliminary results, are presented in previous conference papers. [20][21] The same three coauthors met to resolve any disagreements and to finalize the codes. Next, all of the researchers met to discuss the most prominent themes with respect to the goals of this paper, namely, which examples best demonstrate what our methodological approach made visible about practice?…”