The development of a psychometric test aimed at aligning students to a range of professional roles

Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), working as part of the PREFER project, a European commission funded project, have developed a psychometric test in order to better align engineering students to three distinct professional roles within industry. This paper reports on the development process of the test, which took place between February and August of 2018

Graduate Engineering Skills A Literature Review & Call for Rigorous Methodological Approaches

What sort of working world do our engineering graduates face? Engineering has become a global profession, where professional skills are as important as the intellectual prowess gained by obtaining the qualification itself. First, we must consider what skills are needed for engineers to meet the challenges of Industry 4.0. Academics who wish to engage in activities to enhance engineering education might therefore initially seek to identify which skills are most important and there is a wealth of literature addressing different viewpoints which adds further complexity to evaluating such studies. This paper reports on two independent systematic reviews of literature to identify the most commonly discussed skills that engineering graduates require from the focus of different stakeholders. The first study audited 129 papers and identified the list of most commonly discussed skills, which was then condensed into a list of 17 professional skills. Independently, a review of the lists of skills used in 16 quantitative studies was carried out in relation to engineering skills requirements for graduate engineers specifically. The results of both studies are compared to highlight the similarities and differences between the results of each method. The work also aims to highlight concerns over providing lists of skills in survey questionnaires without a rigorous research methodology. It is hoped that this paper will generate discussion and aims to raise additional research questions to initiate more in-depth research, into the differing views and contextual relationships of skills’ listing

Undergraduate Engineers\u27 Preference for a Range of Professional Roles

This paper reports on a personal preference test which aligns students to a range of professional roles based on their attitudes towards performing particular tasks. The 10-item test was administered to 109 first-year engineering students at TU Dublin, Ireland and 159 third-year engineering students at KU Leuven, Belgium in September of the 2018/19 academic year. The test had two purposes: • to align students to three professional engineering roles based on their preference for performing certain tasks; • to allow students to reflect on an initially tacit model of professional roles. In this paper only the first purpose is considered, followed by an evaluation of the reliability of the test. Preliminary results indicate that the majority of students at TU Dublin and at KU Leuven wish to work in roles which involve the development of radically new products and services, while a much smaller proportion of students wish to work with product and process optimisation. The data also indicates that, in general, students have less favourable attitudes towards working in client-centred roles. These findings present a unique challenge for engineering educators and employers alike in Ireland and Belgium, as industries in these nations shift towards services and away from manufacture. So too do the skills requirements to work effectively in the modern engineering sector

A situational judgement test for engineers to evaluate their professional strengths & weaknesses

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a 23 item Situational Judgement Test (SJT) with scenarios tailored to the engineering profession. The SJT was developed around the PREFER model, with the support of professional engineers and academics in 11 panel discussions. In total 53 engineering professionals and academics were consulted during the development of both the item stems and the item responses of the SJT. Subsequently, the SJT was rolled out to 334 final year and masters students enrolled in engineering programmes at TU Dublin and KU Leuven respectively. After taking part in the test, students were sent automated reports on their performance and the test which highlighted how their response compared to a response gathered from a professional engineer with feedback on how they might improve their competence in a particular area, while also commending their performance in other areas. The results of this study highlight that 8 SJT items had significantly lower mean scores when compared with the test-mean. These items, which were related to perseverance, client focus, vision, planning and organising, solution orientation, team player, work organisation, clear communication and networking all represent potential competence deficits in the population of final year and master students that were tested. This work adds to engineering education scholarship by providing an engineering-specific SJT that enables educators to identify areas of relative strength and weakness in students’ professional judgements in order to better prepare them for their future careers

Engineering students\u27 preferred roles: Are they stable, are there gender differences?

Being able to situate oneself in an engineering role is a developmental process. Students may initially have idealized perceptions of a professional role and over time, they make this role more congruent with their own values and goals [1]. In light of this, Higher Education Institutions are being challenged to offer learning experiences and career exploration activities to enable students to clarify their interests, values and competencies in relation to a professional role [2]. This study compared the professional role preferences of more than 700 engineering students at TU Dublin (Ireland) and KU Leuven (Belgium). Professional role preference was measured with PREFER Explore, a personal preference test for engineers. The test aligns students to three professional roles for early career engineers: Product leadership (focus on radical innovation), Operational excellence (focus on process optimization) and Customer intimacy (focus on tailored solutions and customer satisfaction). A comparison was drawn between the role preference of first year students at TU Dublin and KU Leuven to establish if there were significant differences in preference across both universities. The results suggest that the role preference of engineering students does not shift from first to third year. There is also evidence that the PREFER Explore is sensitive to gender differences, with female students showing a greater preference for customer intimacy than males and males showing a greater preference for operational excellence than females at TU Dublin. The data have a number of implications for the labor market in Ireland and Belgium

National Spatial Skills Project - Preliminary Findings of Phase One

The overall aim of this project is to determine the role that spatial ability plays in academic success in STEM disciplines across all levels of the Irish education system. Research studies carried out across many countries, including Ireland, have shown that spatial skills and reasoning play a central role in determining a student’s perceptions of STEM subjects and disciplines, and significantly impacts on their ability to succeed in these areas. This research is being carried out to establish the levels of spatial ability across all levels of education in Ireland and to introduce education interventions and learning activities to increase students’ spatial skills. It is also being carried out to establish if there is a difference in scores between male and female students and to determine the relationship between subject selection and spatial skills. Spatial ability has long been considered a key indicator of intellectual ability as evidenced by the inclusion of spatial tasks in many intelligence tests. Spatial ability was described by Thurstone (1938) as being a critical component of intellectual ability. Thurstone (1950) cites seven factors related to human intelligence, three of which referred to visual orientation in space: • The ability to recognise the identity of an object when it is seen from different angles; • The ability to imagine the movement or internal displacement among parts of a configuration; • The ability to think about those spatial relations in which the body orientation of the observer is an essential part of the problem. Understanding students’ spatial ability and where necessary improving students’ spatial skills is widely considered to be a key factor for preparing students’ for careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) related disciplines

Engineering students’ preferred roles: are they stable, are there gender differences?

Being able to situate oneself in an engineering role is a developmental process. Students may initially have idealized perceptions of a professional role and over time, they make this role more congruent with their own values and goals. In light of this, Higher Education Institutions are being challenged to offer learning experiences and career exploration activities to enable students to clarify their interests, values and competencies in relation to a professional role. This study compared the professional role preferences of more than 700 engineering students at TU Dublin (Ireland) and KU Leuven (Belgium). Professional role preference was measured with PREFER Explore, a personal preference test for engineers. The test aligns students to three professional roles for early career engineers: Product leadership (focus on radical innovation), Operational excellence (focus on process optimization) and Customer intimacy (focus on tailored solutions and customer satisfaction). A comparison was drawn between the role preference of first year students at TU Dublin and KU Leuven to establish if there were significant differences in preference across both universities. The results suggest that the role preference of engineering students does not shift from first to third year. There is also evidence that the PREFER Explore is sensitive to gender differences, with female students showing a greater preference for customer intimacy than males and males showing a greater preference for operational excellence than females at TU Dublin. The data have a number of implications for the labor market in Ireland and Belgium.status: Published onlin