2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Early-career engineers often enter workplaces that have not been designed with equity in mind. Beliefs about techno-meritocracies reign, blurring experiences of negative stereotypes, bias, and discrimination. Many new engineers learn largely opaque organizational practices and unwritten rules of advancement as they go—with some having more informational advantage than others. One such practice is a developmental, or “stretch”, assignment. Stretch assignments are informally allocated work assignments that can prove one’s readiness to move up the job ladder.

In this study, we explore how early-career professionals experience and understand these informal developmental opportunities availed, or not availed, to them. Specifically, we probe how early-career professionals, especially those who historically have faced socio-structural barriers to attaining professional leadership positions, understand the unwritten rules of advancement at work. Drawing from an interview sample of predominantly women engineers and non-engineers two years after college graduation, coupled with a different open-ended survey dataset collected from early-career women engineers 2-3 years into the workforce, we use qualitative methods of analysis to examine their descriptions of stretch assignments, their learning experiences around stretch assignments, and the insights they have gleaned about advancement, placing their words in conversation with previous sociological research on work assignments and workplace inequality. Our findings show how the dimensions of these types of assignments are not at all clear and unified, with participants’ descriptions reflecting a mixture of often inconsistent and contradictory understandings, such as: random, meritocratic, ad hoc, sought on one’s own, given by top leaders, exploitative, beneficial, enjoyable, and scary. Such assignments are conceived as important for advancement or even “secretly” required for promotion, but there is no consensus on how to access them or connect them to positive career outcomes.

Building from synergistic resources we developed and presented at the ASEE annual meeting in 2023, we seek to connect these findings to continued resource development for engineering students and faculty. With tools and worksheets created on the basis of this and related research, our aim is to equip soon-to-be-professionals, and their mentors and teachers, with insights to advocate for better and more equitable workplace practice.