2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering faculty face challenges at each stage of their careers where student enrollment is experiencing significant growth. These challenges arise at three key career stages: early, mid-career, and late. Faculty must navigate responsibilities such as teaching, research, leadership, and reflecting on their legacy at each stage. Alongside these developmental phases, many faculty members have faced increased pressures in higher education since the pandemic, often leaving them feeling overwhelmed and burnt out. While institutional efforts have primarily focused on improving student support, the pandemic has highlighted the need for more faculty support in balancing teaching, research, and personal well-being. These challenges call for a new approach to faculty development that addresses institutional demands while considering individual faculty member's unique needs and broad range of lived experiences.
An engineering faculty development office at an R1 institution is reimagining its identity to align with the current needs of faculty members by considering their identities and specific challenges. We adopted an entrepreneurial approach to address these complexities that focus on our faculty as clients. With faculty having different needs based on their identity, role, and experiences, our engineering faculty development office designs programming and initiatives through an entrepreneurial mindset. Our office does this by experimenting with different approaches and identifying opportunities and resources to create meaningful value for faculty.
Considering the significance of research output and teaching effectiveness at an R1 institution, the office also puts just as much emphasis on faculty communities, supporting faculty through mentorship, improving their student engagement, and facilitating their career advancement and recognition. This entrepreneurial mindset is built on the understanding that faculty thrive when they feel holistically supported. Creating a culture that embodies the African proverb Ubuntu: “I am because we are,” our office encourages our faculty to elevate and support each other while enabling them to pursue their professional aspirations and balance their personal lives.
The engineering faculty development office used the Harvard Business Review’s [2] identity matrix to define our brand and establish our position, competency, and character. This foundational tool helps us articulate ourselves as a faculty development office. Over the past two years, the team participated in team exercises, discussions, retreats, stakeholder meetings, and workshops. Our team collaborated closely with faculty at all stages through an iterative process to shape our mission, vision, and goals for the next three years.
These activities have established the foundation for an entrepreneurial approach that drives our operations. By focusing on mission, values, and goals, we have developed the initial framework of a cohesive brand that shapes our approach to relationships, culture, and the office’s approach to faculty development. This approach makes our faculty development efforts purposeful, consistent, and aligned with the college’s direction and the needs of the faculty we serve. This paper outlines our activities, approaches, and the outcomes of setting the groundwork for impactful programs and initiatives to support faculty at a large engineering college within an R1 institution.