2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Biomedical Quality Engineers (QEs) ensure that medical devices are safe, reliable, and consistent. Over 40% of entry-level biomedical engineering (BME) jobs are QE positions, and 70% require QE-related skills. However, most BME undergraduates are unaware of careers in QE, and many current QEs learned about the field after they entered the job market. BME students have low outcome expectations for QE careers and higher outcome expectations for research and development (R&D) positions. This study tests whether increasing awareness of QE and R&D careers improves outcome expectations for either type of engineering career. Accurate career expectations are necessary in order for students to make informed decisions about QE or R&D career pathways.

This project builds on our qualitative study of the experiences of current Quality Engineers, which found that they were unaware of Quality Engineering as a career for BMEs when they were undergraduates. Similar to our previous work, we use qualitative methods based on Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) to discover pivotal points in the participants’ learning experiences. Specifically, we will identify areas where BME curricula did not provide undergraduates with QE-related learning experiences and how exposure to QE concepts changes student perceptions of QE careers. Our project partners with a master’s degree in medical product development. This program provides coursework on quality systems, regulatory management, and other QE principles and it enrolls recently graduated BME students. We collected focus group data from students as they started in this program and are in the process of interviewing them now that they’ve completed the program. In both the focus groups and interviews, we inquire about their prior and current views on QE as a career path. We will use SCCT-based a priori codes as well as open coding of the transcripts to test the intervention suggested by our previous research — that introducing students to Quality Engineering through coursework will increase their interests and outcome expectations regarding the career path.

This qualitative research project will inform the design of BME curricula to create a balanced awareness of both QE and R&D career pathways so students can pursue careers that match their interests, goals, and outcome expectations.