Preparing Today’s Engineering Graduate: An Empirical Study of Professional Skills Required by Employers

Abstract

where he has taught business communication courses since 2014. Graham, who has a Master's degree in communications from The American University, has co-authored several articles in non-technical skills and has taught English, journalism and business communications courses at Towson University and Towson University. After a successful career in journalism and marketing, Graham launched Bigger Pie Strategies, a marketing company formed in 2010, and co-founded Serious Soft Skills, an education and training company, in 2017.

Improving skills in master's degree contexts

“…In addition, in this type of action, professional activity does not follow a linear sequence in its difficulty; that is, it does not respond to an increase in its complexity depending on time or the training and knowledge of the technician who deals with said activity. Also, in recent research, Graham & Porterfield (2018) confirm that the broad learning have to include the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic and environmental context.…”

Growing a Culture of Technological Stewardship

“…Through six years of pilot projects and network building-including deep engagement with more than 350 leaders at 150 organizations, and broader engagement with over 10,000 individuals within and beyond the engineering community-ECL has identified a set of overarching behaviors, which it terms Technological Stewardship (TS), that involves taking a value sensitive approach to embedding ethics, sustainability, and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) principles into the practice and culture of engineering [4]. Though calls for these skills are growing in industry [5], and particularly in professional engineering domains [6], they are not widespread among engineers or engineering-focused organizations [7]. However, a TS mindset, which links ethics and values to the skilled and intentional design, development, and deployment of tech innovation, is crucial for engineers and technologists to drive technology adoption that is beneficial for all.…”

What engineering employers want: An analysis of technical and professional skills in engineering job advertisements

“…For example, one study explored job descriptions in construction and engineering and focused on 66 advertisements that considered leadership, specifically (Hartmann & Jahren, 2015), which had a similar sample size as another (77 job advertisements) that explored technical and professional skills for chemical and mechanical engineering PhDs (Watson & Lyons, 2011). Graham and Porterfield (2018) analyzed 82 engineering job advertisements from the Chicago area to understand the prominence of professional skills, and Passow and Passow (2017) derived a qualitative data set related to the nature of engineering and generic engineering competencies of 36,000 job advertisements via a meta‐analytic technique across 25 studies with a period of record ending in 2014.…”