2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering programs accredited by ABET require “a culminating major engineering design experience that incorporates appropriate engineering standards and multiple constraints” and builds upon prior coursework (ABET, 2025). These capstone experiences can foster high levels of autonomy, ownership, and decision latitude, ideal conditions to strengthen self-regulation, intrinsic motivation, and early-career leadership capacities such as managing ambiguity and cost/benefit analyses. However, newly graduated engineers can encounter low-agency environments where tasks are narrowly scoped and decision latitude is limited. This abrupt shift challenges both motivation and a developing leadership identity, highlighting the need for intentionally designed educational experiences that help students anticipate and navigate the lower-agency conditions of early-career engineering work. This review synthesizes existing research to clarify how current educational practices support or fail to support students as they move from high-agency educational contexts into lower-agency early-career roles.

The literature highlights this misalignment between education and practice. Trevelyan (2010) describes engineering work more as a distributed, socially coordinated performance than as isolated problem-solving, while Korte (2009) emphasizes that early-career learning depends more on relational negotiation and social adaptation than technical capacity. Stevens et al. (2008) extend this view through a three-dimensional model of engineering learning, illustrating that professional growth depends not only on what engineers know but on how they position themselves within complex sociotechnical systems. When the ability to navigate is constrained by reduced agency, the connection between academic learning and professional identity formation is disrupted (Johri & Olds, 2011). Lutz and Paretti (2017) further detail how the most important early-career learning occurs in unstructured, on-the-job contexts requiring self-leadership and metacognition. Patrick and Borrego (2016) synthesize identity research to show that recognition by others and demonstration of competence are central to sustaining engagement and belonging in engineering, yet entry-level engineers often experience a drop in both when their contributions feel invisible, feedback is sparse, and opportunities to demonstrate independent competence are limited. Taken together, these studies suggest that the transition from university into lower-agency practice weakens the developmental link between agency, recognition, and identity elements essential for leadership emergence and persistence.

This conceptual review highlights the school-to-work transition as an opportunity for engineering leadership education, addressing LEAD’s Inform and Explore priorities by showing the need for curricula that explicitly prepare students for leadership and growth under constraints. Existing studies collectively suggest that intentionally connecting students’ sense of agency, professional identity, and understanding of workplace realities within the curriculum may better align educational and professional contexts. Future research will explore how reflective practices, feedback structures, and early exposure to professional settings could support these connections.