Changing importances of professional practice competencies over an engineering career

Abstract

short (100 words) The profession depends on its practitioners developing management and leadership skills to achieve good client outcomes and robust, reliable products or services, delivered by profitable, ethically run engineering businesses. The difficulty is determining what those skills are, and where in the career they are needed. The New Zealand population of professional engineers was surveyed to rate the importance of a list of management and leadership topics. Results show the relative importance of various topics and how their importance is perceived differently with years of experience. The results also help differentiate the roles of teaching institutions and ongoing in-career professional development. Abstract long Problem-The profession depends on its practitioners developing management and leadership skills to achieve good client outcomes and robust, reliable products or services, delivered by profitable, ethically run engineering businesses. The difficulty is determining what those skills are, and where in the career they are needed. Approach -The New Zealand population of professional engineers was surveyed to rate the importance of a list of management and leadership topics. Findings-Results show the relative importance of various topics and how their importance is perceived differently with years of experience. The rated importance of most engineering management topics becomes significantly higher as the engineer's years of experience lengthen. The areas of largest gap IntroductionIt is expected that engineers will use engineering management and leadership tools more extensively as their career progresses, and some become specialised management engineers (IPENZ, 2015). Their careers start by taking responsibility for the management of their own personal work and the professionalism thereof, to become independent practitioners. With time they typically take responsibility for managing the work of others in projects and organisations, to become technology or team leaders. Some may stop there, but many other engineers subsequently take responsibilities for managing whole business units or organisations, leading staff, and perhaps eventually for governance and setting strategic direction. Consequently there is a need for engineers to develop an evolving set of professional skills as their career develops. But what exactly are those skills and when are they needed? This question is also relevant to the need for life-long learning and enduring professional development (IEM, 2009). This is addressed by analysing a large survey-data set to determine the relative importance of management and leadership topics for engineers at different stages in their careers. The particular area of focus for this research was the New Zealand (NZ) engineering profession. In the present context we do not make a firm differentiation between 'management' and 'leadership', but instead simply use the term 'engineering management' to refer to the general set of skills required for organisational success. This was do...

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