2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background
Engineering disciplines and careers have been continuously shifting over the past decades. The options for students to navigate through their student experiences into their careers are numerous and varied. Increased understanding of these various student pathways can help us better advise students and better design the student experience to support students preparing for their careers.

Purpose
The purpose of this review was to attempt to answer two main research questions: 1) What does the literature tell us about the potential types of engineering student pathways and how are those types characterized? 2) What are the influencing factors for a student taking one of those types of engineering student pathways?

Design/Method
This literature review was framed by three developmental theories —“life span, life space” theory (Super, 1980), Relational Developmental Systems Theory (Lerner et al., 2013) and Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent, 1994). The “life span, life space” theory conceptualizes life into distinct life phases while the “Relational Development Systems” theory proposes that differences in time and place can contribute to plasticity across the life span. Social Cognitive Career theory posits that learning experiences can influence self-efficacy and outcome expectations, which ultimately influences interests, goals and career choice actions. These learning experiences are in turn influenced by personal and contextual affordances.
Combining these three theories we define a conceptual framework that shapes our literature review. We map the student pathway across four life stages: high school (HS), HS-PSE transition, postsecondary education (PSE), PSE-Workplace transition. We examine each phase for individual-context relations and identify differences in personal and contextual factors for each phase. Lastly, we identify different learning experiences and choices identified in the literature at each phase to characterize the process towards a student pathway.
A literature search was done in a variety of scholarly databases including Compendex, Scopus, Web of Science and others, using keywords such as ‘engineering’, ‘student pathway’, and ‘career’. We included in our review peer-reviewed journal articles as well as reports by engineering accreditation agencies and professional associations, and excluded any newspaper or magazine articles. We also limited our scope to the life phases described above, and excluded literature focused on elementary school or younger, as well as literature focused on influencing factors and learning experiences that took place after the PSE-Workplace transition.

Results
The findings from the current literature primarily show two main typologies for engineering student pathways, and this being primarily characterized by outcome, i.e. choice in PSE major or career, and whether that choice is ‘engineering-related’ or ‘non-engineering related’. The literature shows that types of learning experiences can vary across each life phase which can impact these choices, and that pathways can differ based on personal factors (e.g. demographics such as gender and race) and contextual factors (e.g. available support systems).

Contributions
While this paper is limited by its defined scope, it will help define the space for the research area of career pathways of engineering students. This foundational work will pave the way for empirical studies that can examine matters of interest in each of the five life stages that have shaped engineering students’ career development, either toward the engineering profession or other paths.