2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper presents survey findings on the career outcomes of an undergraduate Engineering Leadership (EL) program’s alumni community. Findings were collected as part of a broader longitudinal assessment initiative recently launched at the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program (GEL), which acquires data from incoming, current, and outgoing program participants and from program alumni to track developmental progress and outcomes. While we briefly introduce this broader ongoing assessment initiative and its aims, we focus here on findings and implications from a specific survey instance: that which was deployed to GEL’s alumni who are currently working and have up to 11 years of work experience since completing the program (n = 293). We report the types of occupations undertaken by these Engineering Leadership alumni and examine how they compare to those of the broader School of Engineering in which the program resides. We present several characterizations of program alums’ careers as a function of years of work experience, including: occupation type, extent and nature of supervisory experience, whether individuals have undertaken “technical expert” roles, extent of career advancement, and key intersections of such variables (e.g., instances of roles simultaneously characterized as both supervisor and technical expert). We then present qualitative written responses from alumni about perceived challenges and opportunities related to career advancement, highlighting alums’ sentiments of how the EL program supported (or could have better supported) their careers. We find that a majority of alumni in our sample (63%) are working in managerial positions by the decade mark in their career, yet that these alumni have advanced into management along different paths, with some remaining more technical while retaining an engineer title, and others following a less technical executive pathway that nonetheless remains connected to engineering. We also find that alumni encounter career challenges in areas of organization-level leadership skills and in navigating possible career and role types. Based on findings, we discuss potential opportunity areas through which educators can enhance the effectiveness of EL programs.