2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This full paper explores the self-perceived influences of COVID-19 on the development of expertise, decision-making processes, and engineering intuition among early-career engineering practitioners. Intuition is a skill used by experts in the decision-making process when problem solving, and believed to develop alongside expertise largely through experience. Previous work supports that at least six years of experience is necessary for expertise development. We subsequently define early-career as up to six years of post-baccalaureate experience and expect that this population will not yet have expertise and therefore not use intuition. However, research has shown that early-career practitioners who graduated from a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI) prior to the onset of COVID-19 both claim expertise and report using intuition in their decision-making. This unexpected result may be reflective of the PUI’s emphasis on high-impact experiences, such as undergraduate research, extracurriculars, and internships. For current early-career engineers, the COVID-19 pandemic affected their undergraduate education, first years on the job, or a combination of the two by limiting access to certain types of experiences. The goal of this research is to better understand how COVID-19 influenced the development of expertise, decision-making processes, and intuition of early-career engineers who are alumni of the same PUI as prior work. We interviewed 11 current early-career engineering practitioners who graduated between 2018 and 2023. Interviews included several questions regarding expertise, decision-making, and intuition. In this paper we consider the questions: ‘Do you feel you have an expertise?,’ ‘Does your decision-making process differ from when you first started?,’ ‘Do you have engineering intuition?,’ and ‘How did COVID-19 affect the development of your expertise/decision-making/intuition?’ Responses to these questions were qualitatively coded to capture common themes. Results from coding reveal that the loss of experience due to COVID-19 parallels a lack of ownership of expertise by three participants and claims of having a faulty, or underdeveloped, intuition. Further analysis of responses indicates that hands-on and collaborative experiences are most helpful for developing expertise and intuition, highlighting their usefulness when integrated into engineering education curriculum.