2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The relationship between university curricula and workplace practice is a persistent concern for engineering education scholars and practitioners. But while design has long been viewed as a central pillar of undergraduate coursework, scholars such as Russell and Vinsel (2015; 2018; 2019) have long argued that in practice, few engineers engage in design, particularly novel product design, and far more are involved in what they term maintenance. Work by scholars such as Trevelyan (2010, 2014), Anderson et al. (2010), and others tends to substantiate that claim as these scholars document the complexity of engineering work. Yet while we have studies that, like Trevelyan’s and Anderson et al.’s, capture the full range of tasks engineers do in their daily work, little research to date has explored the major job responsibilities for junior engineers during their first year. Without such knowledge, educators, including design educators, are at a disadvantage in effectively shaping curricula to support the school to work transition, and new graduates may not have an accurate, actionable understanding of engineering work.

To address this gap, we draw on data from a large multi-institution study of the school to work transition. Two cohorts of students from four universities were interviewed over the course of their first year of work. The interviews took place approximately three, six, and twelve months after the students' start date at their full time engineering job. The interviews were semi-structured focusing on the type of tasks junior engineers worked on, required relevant skills, challenges, and how capstone helped prepare them for their first year of work. The resulting data set include 87 interviews at the 3-month point, 86 interviews at the 6-month point, and 76 interviews at the 12-month point.

To analyze the primary responsibilities of these new engineers, we adapted Trevelyan's (2014) classification of engineering activities to establish a framework for analyzing job functions. These classifications formed an a priori coding frame for deductive coding using MaxQDA and following Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (2014); both the major categories and the subcodes were then iteratively refined through repeated passes through the data and multiple rounds of peer debriefing.

Preliminary findings substantiate and extend the arguments put forth by Vinsel and Russell; While some junior engineers do novel design work, it is not a major job responsibility for all, or even the majority, of participants in this study, and even those working on design often focused on only one aspect of the process. Other major job functions included not only a variety of maintenance-related responsibilities at production facilities, including both routine maintenance and troubleshooting, but also performing due diligence (e.g., reviewing the work of other engineers to check compliance or processes), field engineering (e.g., installation and repair at client sites), and business functions such as market analysis or sales.

These findings provide an important complement to studies on the skills needed in engineering work by providing a more concrete understanding of the work those skills are directed toward. In doing so, they also provide design educators across the curriculum with insights that can help them better align curricula with post-graduation employment.

References
Anderson, K. J. B., Courter, S. S., McGlamery, T., Nathans-Kelly, T. M., & Nicometo, C. G. (2010, 2010/12/01). Understanding engineering work and identity: a cross-case analysis of engineers within six firms. Engineering Studies, 2(3), 153–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2010.519772

Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Sage.

Russell, A., & Vinsel, L. (2015). Hail the maintainers: Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance, and for most lives it is maintenance that matters more. Aeon Essays, 1–14.

Russell, A. L., & Vinsel, L. (2018). After innovation, turn to maintenance. Technology and Culture, 59(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2018.0004.

Russell, A. L., & Vinsel, L. (2019). Make Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care. In M. Wisnioski, E. S. Hintz, & M. S. Kleine (Eds.), Does America Need More Innovators? (pp. 249–269). MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11344.001.0001

Trevelyan, J. (2010, 2010/12/01). Reconstructing engineering from practice. Engineering Studies, 2(3), 175–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2010.520135

Trevelyan, J. (2014). Towards a theoretical framework for engineering practice. In B. Williams, J. Figueiredo, & J. Trevelyan (Eds.), Engineering practice in a global context: understanding the technical and the social (pp. 33–60). CRC Press/Balkema. https://doi.org/10.1201/b15792