2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering as an endeavor is thousands of years old, and engineering as a profession is hundreds of years old. Yet, many engineering students lack a clear understanding of what engineers actually do. Descriptions of engineering practice tend to emphasize the technical side of engineers' work, and value creation in engineering is often perceived as resulting from technological innovation. As a result, both the ordinary engineering routines without significant innovation and the social side of engineering practice are easily overlooked.

The competency-based professional role model for early-career engineers depicts three types of roles that engineers, regardless of discipline, often take on in their working lives: Product Leadership (focusing on radical innovation of new ideas, processes, or products), Operational Excellence (focusing on the design and implementation of operational processes), and Customer Intimacy (focusing on working with customers to provide them with technically tailored solutions). The three roles emphasize different aspects of engineering work and require different competencies for success.

This study aims to understand how engineering students in Finland perceive and value the different professional roles of engineers and the associated competencies. We also seek to determine whether gender differences exist in perceptions or valuations. The data were collected in September 2024 as part of an annual student survey conducted by a labor union for university-educated engineers. The respondents (n=1934) come from all Finnish universities providing engineering education. 60% of the respondents were male, 38% female, and the rest identified as other or did not wish to disclose their gender.

The results show that students recognize all the three roles to a somewhat similar extent, with Operational Excellence being the most recognized and Customer Intimacy being the least recognized. When respondents were asked to prioritize specific work tasks, the tasks related to Operational Excellence were rated as most compelling and the tasks related to Customer Intimacy as least compelling, with the difference between the role of Customer Intimacy and the other roles being particularly clear. The order of the roles remained the same when the respondents rated the importance of the specific competencies in engineering work. The two competencies rated as least necessary were client focus and empathy, both of which are central to the role of Customer Intimacy. The observed trend applied to both male and female respondents (there were too few non-binary respondents in the data to conduct an analysis), and in general, the gender differences were very small.

The results suggest that the role of technological innovation is not overemphasized in the perception of engineering work among engineering students in Finland, but that the social side of engineering is, if not overlooked, at least undervalued. Whether this is due to self-selection into the field, enculturation during study, or other factors is beyond the scope of this study, but the phenomenon must be recognized and seriously considered if Finnish engineering education is to meet the needs of employers.