2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A national shortage of skilled engineering employees in the microelectronics workforce has led to difficulties in hiring talented, qualified employees in the microelectronics industry. This shortage has led to the US government placing an emphasis on workforce development in universities across the nation. However, as students approach employers looking for employment opportunities, many are unprepared to discuss how their skills and experiences translate to real-world experiences. While some students utilize the career services at their universities, other students prepare on their own and then are surprised when they do not receive a job offer, even with superb technical skills. These challenges have created a need to provide students with excellent professional development resources that help them prepare to meet with employers. The purpose of this paper is to share a framework, methods, criteria, and results for determining what are the best professional development resources that help multidisciplinary engineering students in large, multi-institutional microelectronics workforce development center that encompasses over 20 universities prepare for meeting with employers to discuss employment opportunities. The research question that drove this research is how do we determine which professional development materials are the most beneficial for engineering students to prepare when meeting with employers about job opportunities? A team of faculty and undergraduate researchers developed a framework of topic areas for which professional development activities were needed for students when preparing to meet with employers. The framework was then used to find professional development resources from institutional career services, literature, and professional development press. Based on the located resources, a grounded theory approach was used to develop criteria that were applied to the gathered resources to determine the “best” to share as exemplars with students as they prepare to meet with employers. The developed framework focused on the six most important topic areas to help students prepare for meeting with employers: 1) resume development and review, 2) cover letter help and review, 3) mock interviews and interview preparation, 4) elevator pitch, 5) follow-up with prospective employers, and 6) job offer negotiation. For each topic area, a content analysis was performed on over 20 institutional resources and over 20 professional development press and literature resources. We used the ground theory approach, and four criteria emerged from the data to split the resources into categories and allow comparison between the articles for which ones were the “best”. The four criteria focused on students’ usability of the resources: 1) easy to read, 2) descriptive, 3) accurate, and 4) engaging. With these criteria, the resources were separated into categories containing a list of qualitative criteria and features. We used the criteria in choosing two institutional resources and two professional development press resources as the “best” resources for each topic area and those were shared as exemplars. The framework, methods, criteria, and results for determining professional development resources have helped identify the exemplars and the “best” and most beneficial resources for students to prepare to meet with employers. The evaluated exemplars can also serve as a model and reference for others to create beneficial resources to help students. For those starting up a workforce development initiative or evaluating similar materials, these results can be used to assess the “best” and most beneficial resources, and similarly find resources that are exemplars.