2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The transition from academic training to professional practice often exposes engineers to real-world ethical dilemmas and equity concerns that may not have been fully addressed during their formal education. As engineering education evolves to address not only technical competencies but also the broader social responsibilities of engineers, the knowledge of how early-career engineers grapple with these issues in real-world settings becomes increasingly important. The primary purpose of this NSF-funded project is to gain insight into the professional experiences of early-career engineers regarding ethics and equity through a national survey. The survey will focus on early-career engineers with five years or less of experience in the field, to obtain approximately 1,000 completed responses. To recruit participants from various engineering disciplines, we will utilize various methods, including outreach through social media platforms like LinkedIn, as well as engagement with professional organizations specific to different engineering fields. Using a quantitative research approach, to examine the data collected from these surveys, we will employ a combination of inferential and descriptive statistical methods. Inferential techniques, such as regression analysis, will be used to identify relationships and draw conclusions beyond the immediate data, while descriptive statistics, including measures such as frequency distributions and percentiles, will provide a detailed summary and overview of the key patterns and trends observed in the dataset. This approach will allow for both an in-depth understanding of the data and the ability to make broader inferences about early career engineers' experiences in the transition phase. This study reports on the experiences of early-career engineers regarding ethics and equity in the workplace and in their professional work. The findings of our research can help engineering educators understand the ethical and equity-related challenges early-career engineers may encounter during the early phases of their professional careers. Also, the study will provide valuable knowledge to engineering employers, highlighting the difficulties younger engineers may experience, and enabling employers to proactively address and support the ethical development of their workforce.

Keywords: survey, engineering ethics, equity, early-career engineers