2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this work in progress, we explore what skills and experiences help engineering graduates transition from novices to expert engineers in industry. To achieve success in industry, recent engineering graduates may rely on applying tools from their undergraduate education, such as recognizing familiar technical problem situations, and asking meaningful questions to approach technical work when they possess limited expertise (Deters, et al., 2024). By contrast, senior engineers emphasize having soft skills like being able to lead a team and proficiency in change management as being essential to career advancement (Cox, et al., 2012). This difference in perspective exists because entry level engineers are novices while senior engineers are experts. To define the two, we can look at how novices and experts might examine a system. Novices focus on perceptually available components of the system, whereas experts integrate structural and behavioral elements to form an explanation (Hmelo-Silver, Pfeffer, 2004). The goal of this study is to identify how engineering curriculum can be altered to expedite the transition from the novice stage to the expert stage. To do so, the researchers will be interviewing ten engineers at six different aerospace companies with five to ten years of work experience who fall somewhere between the expert and novice stages. Interview questions will cover what challenges they faced entering the workplace, how they tackled them, and what made them feel like engineers during this process. These interviewees were chosen because they have graduated from universities recently enough to remember their undergraduate experiences, but also have worked long enough as engineers to have perspective on what was challenging and what was easy about entering industry. Existing literature focuses on entry level and seasoned engineers, leaving the population in this paper largely unstudied in terms of what contributes to building their identities as engineers. In person interviews will be conducted and recorded to generate an audio transcript that will be thematically analyzed through inductive and deductive coding. Prior work done by the researchers suggests that peer mentorship and robust onboarding practices will be mentioned as critical to success in industry. Additionally, the team anticipates that milestones related to technical work will be cited as experiences that made interviewees "feel like engineers". Broader implications for the results of this study are to inform engineering faculty regarding what features to add or continue incorporating in their undergraduate programs to help students identify as engineers earlier in their careers.