2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Our project, led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Rice University, seeks to assess the long-term impacts of Maker-focused educational programs on career outcomes and industry skills development. While much attention has been given to the positive educational outcomes of these educational programs, little has been written about their effects on career prospects and industry hiring trends. The project aims to identify relevant metrics for measuring career impacts, classify academic makerspaces, and develop tools for assessing the relationship between makerspace experiences and career readiness. We anticipate that the data generated will be valuable for educational policy, philanthropic support, and employer decisions, guiding strategic investments in design and fabrication studios to enhance workforce skills development. This study has two parts, the first employs mixed methods, combining qualitative interviews with over 30 students and 15 employers to identify metrics reflecting Makerspace impacts on careers. We aim to create a universal framework for assessing the link between makerspace experiences and career readiness across diverse institutions and studios. In the second part, we are developing a systematic taxonomy to categorize academic makerspaces and anticipate that the research will iteratively utilize informed insights between Activities 1 and 2 to refine the metrics framework for accessible stakeholder use. We anticipate to be able to share the work in progress results of our coding efforts from the interviews we will have completed.