2023 Collaborative Network for Computing and Engineering Diversity (CoNECD)

Within engineering education, there have been rising calls for research on the transitional period students face leading up to graduation (e.g., post-graduation planning) and moving into the next phase of their career. Existing research has focused either on the disconnects between what students learn in school and what constitutes success on the job or graduates’ experiences in their first few years on the job. This study seeks to complement existing research by focusing on the experience leading up to graduation, as students seek to make sense of engineering career pathways and how they pursue and make decisions about engineering positions. As the demand for a demographically diverse and highly skilled engineering workforce continues to grow, talent acquisition is becoming more strategic. The use of workforce data to better understand engineering talent can aid in tailoring their methods to attract the brightest talent to their organizations. By studying the career planning process of engineering students from historically and systemically excluded groups, we can more readily understand their intended career trajectory and how they navigate post-graduation planning.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how minority undergraduate engineering students conceptualize engineering career pathways based on an organization’s website content. Towards this aim, we, a team of minority undergraduate engineering students, led a qualitative analysis of the websites of two national labs: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC). The website content was analyzed using keywords from an on-going systematic literature review on engineering careers. Then we pulled out excerpts from the website that were associated with each keyword and annotated each excerpt with our impression of the company as a potential employer. In collaboration with other researchers, we used an a priori codebook, made from contemporary career frameworks, to assign primary and secondary codes to each of our perceptions, updating code definitions as needed. The results illustrated how we viewed both labs as committed to providing employees with a good work-life balance, as well as opportunities for both personal and professional growth. The difference between our perceptions of the two was in the way KSNSC appeared to appeal to candidates with a deep sense of pride in their standard of work, while LANL to other common ideals such as environmentalism.

Career planning is a long process that can be challenging for all students. The insights from our study can provide organizations and higher education institutions with a deeper understanding of how this generation of engineering graduates makes sense of engineering career pathways. These results can aid engineering programs in helping students navigate post-graduation planning. Organizations may focus their attention on augmenting their approach to talent acquisition and management in a manner that supports the development of a wider range of engineering career trajectories. These changes would provide clarity in a graduate's conceptualization of what an engineering career entails and allow synchrony between their expectations and a company’s potential career opportunities for them.