Improving Engineering Recruitment

Abstract

Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) is a new provider of Engineering in New Zealand and faces numerous challenges. These include a general ignorance of engineering amongst our secondary school students and very strong competition from established providers. Traditional marketing strategies have been unsuccessful in achieving the level of growth our programme requires. In collaboration with the regional polytechnic, Wellington Institute of Technology (WelTec), VUW undertook a major exercise to identify issues relevant to recruitment and retention in the "digital" engineering specializations. This paper considers the recruitment aspect of this project. Demographic studies indicate that our target audience strongly identify with being "geeks", something that no New Zealand tertiary training institute incorporates into its marketing strategy. In response, a novel website, hardcopy "geek hero" publication and clothing range was created. The publications have been extremely well received by secondary school students, teachers and career advisors. Informative and promotional posters have also been created for display in secondary school laboratories and classrooms. Whilst final enrolment numbers are not at this stage known, one indicator of the success of our initiatives can be seen in the unprecedented increase in preenrolment numbers. Overview The New Zealand Government acknowledges that the country does not produce sufficient numbers of engineering graduates. As a result, Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) accepted its first students into a new Bachelor of Engineering degree in 2007. VUW has chosen to specialize in what we will generically label "digital" engineering. Specifically VUW offers Electronics and Computer Systems Engineering (a programme that includes several mechatronics courses), Network Engineering and Software Engineering. This "digital" label is not an accurate one, but will serve in this instance to differentiate these forms of engineering from (say) Civil, Mechanical or Chemical engineering. VUW is now the primary university provider of engineering in Wellington, New Zealand. It faces challenges in attracting engineering students given the specialized nature of its engineering offering (and poor student understanding of these specializations) and extremely strong competition from New Zealand"s two most established engineering universities, The University of Auckland and Canterbury University. Indeed, local secondary school engineering students have many decades of tradition of leaving the city, primarily for Canterbury in order to pursue their studies. This tradition is firmly in the mindset of parents, secondary school teachers and careers advisors. To help retain engineering students in the Wellington region, a partnership has been formed between VUW and the Wellington Institute of Technology (WelTec), the primary polytechnic engineering provider in the region. This partnership is non-competitive in that VUW offers a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) (a four year degree awarded with honors), M...

Assessing Distinctives of the New XXXX Engineering Program in Terms of Their Impact on Recruitment, Student Satisfaction and Employment Potential

“…They determined that the three main factors that contribute to a student's decision of secondary school subject choice are their interest in the subject, their academic ability and the perceived career opportunities. However, additional significant influencers in this subject selection decision include the opinions of their peers, parents, teachers and careers advisors" [10]. In response to this crisis of attrition, Carnegie and Watterson of Victoria University Wellington developed a marketing campaign which started with a simple survey asking students how they had heard about the program.…”

“…"This study indicated that students with an interest in, and ability to perform in these "digital" areas of engineering, strongly identified with being "geeks". Rather than this being a negative connotation, the target secondary school students embraced this label" [10]. Once this subculture had been identified, a new marketing campaign was developed, highlighting the heroic aspects of such engineering "geeks" in order to have a greater impact on a more specified target audience.…”

“…Once this subculture had been identified, a new marketing campaign was developed, highlighting the heroic aspects of such engineering "geeks" in order to have a greater impact on a more specified target audience. Carnegie and Watterson write that, "Given that we are a new provider of engineering and had to break decades of an established practice of engineering students moving out of region, we decided to embark on a somewhat radical departure from the traditional university recruitment strategies" [10]. Although the concept of a marketing campaign for "Geek-Heroes" was considered controversial at first by the university's marketing department, brochures, booklets and posters ended up being pushed through with surprisingly positive results.…”