Leading from the bottom up: Leadership conceptions and practices among early career engineers

© American Society for Engineering Education, 2017This study was conducted with support from the Dean's Strategic Fund (Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto) and a consortium of industry partners

Engineering ethics education: More than a CEAB requirement

The Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) requires faculties of engineering to incorporate graduate attribute 3.1.10 “ethics and equity” into their curricula. More than the CEAB requirement, engineering educators have an obligation to prepare students for the ethical dilemmas they will inevitably face in their workplaces and their lives. Our analysis of survey data collected during a pilot study of our ethical case studies project examines a gap between students’ perceptions about the effectiveness and importance of engineering ethics education. While there was a considerable range in participants’ ratings of the effectiveness of previous engineering ethics coursework, they consistently placed a high value on the importance of ethics in engineering education. This finding is significant because it challenges the prevailing assumption that engineering students’ disinterest in non-technical education is the primary barrier to effective ethics instruction.This study was conducted with support from the Dean's Engineering Instructional Innovation Program (Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto)

Where’s my code? Engineers navigating ethical issues on an uneven terrain

© American Society for Engineering Education, 2018This study was conducted with support from the Dean's Engineering Instructional Innovation Program (Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto)

Sports, arts and concrete canoes: Engineers learning to lead outside the formal curriculum

Leadership has historically been part of professional engineers’ work life, but until recently it was not integrated into the formal engineering curriculum. With the support of the National Academy of Engineering and Engineers Canada along with regulatory pressures from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board, committed engineering educators with ties to industry have begun to take up this curricular challenge in greater numbers. Unfortunately, many of these programs touch only a small segment of the student body because they remain on the periphery of engineering faculties. As a result, we know little about the leadership learning opportunities and experiences of undergraduate engineering students as a whole. Our study fills this gap by examining how 1203 undergraduate engineering students at a large, Canadian, research-intensive university have used non-formal learning spaces—co-curricular and extra-curricular activities—to hone their leadership and engineering skills and identities. Our quantitative analysis of survey results suggests that explicit leadership programing, student government and industry-based professional development activities were most effective at helping engineering students develop their leadership skills. When it came to catalyzing their engineering skills development, we found that internships, design competitions and professional development activities with an industry focus were most effective. We conclude the paper by identifying practical and theoretical implications for engineering educators, student life professionals, engineering deans and student engagement researchers.This study was conducted with support from the Dean's Strategic Fund (Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto) and a consortium of industry partners

Transitioning from university to employment in engineering: The role of curricular and co-curricular activities

© American Society for Engineering Education, 2017This study was conducted with support from the Dean's Strategic Fund (Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto), the Ontario Human Capital Research and Innovation Fund (Government of Ontario), and a consortium of industry partners

Using institutional entrepreneurship to ‘reverse engineer’ a large engineering leadership institute

Leadership is poised to become a major feature of engineering education, but the question of how to grow programs within the institutional context of engineering faculties remains largely unanswered by the literature. Our analysis of a single historic case study of Canada’s largest engineering leadership institute sheds light on some of the strategies used to grow from a small program to a stable educational unit. We find valuable insights on how to generalize these findings by applying concepts from institutional entrepreneurship to make sense of founder strategies

Counting Past Two: Engineers' Leadership Learning Trajectories

©2019 American Society for Engineering Education. ASEE Aligning Graduate Programs with Industrial Needs Proceedings, June 19, 2019, Tampa, FL.In the early 1950s, many science and technology focused organizations in the United States and Canada began to formalize a technical career track to accommodate the professional aspirations of engineers reluctant to abandon technical work for management [1-7]. While the resulting dual career track model—characterized by both managerial and technical ladders—remains dominant in human resource management theory, there is little evidence that engineers’ actual work experiences map on to two discrete domains [8, 9]. Our paper expands the dual track model by tracing the actual career paths and leadership learning experiences of 28 senior engineers in eight industries. We do this, not to better understand engineers’ career paths for their own sake, but rather to examine how engineers learn to lead in workplace contexts. In particular, we ask two organizationally related research questions: 1) What career paths do engineering leaders follow? and 2) How do they learn to lead along the way? After briefly reviewing the literature on engineering leadership development and engineers’ career paths, we introduce the situated learning perspective that grounds our work and present our findings in two parts. Part one characterizes six discrete paths—1) Company man, 2) Technical specialist, 3) Boundary spanner, 4) Entrepreneur, 5) Social impact change agent, and 6) Invisible engineer, and part two identifies salient leadership learning experiences that correspond with each path. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for engineering leadership educators.We could not have done this work without the combined support of our industry-based Community of Practice, and the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering Dean’s Strategic Fund, at the University of Toronto