The Early Career Years of Engineering: Crossing the Threshold Between Education and Practice

Abstract

In studies of engineering practice, the early career phase is a particularly intriguing area of inquiry. It is frequently imagined as the time when more-or-less competent graduates enter the workforce and launch successful careers, often in large corporate organizations and supported by various types of onboarding programs. Yet this kind of idealized representation belies a much more complex reality, one in which many engineering graduates pursue careers on the edges (or outside) of engineering, navigate complex organizational socialization and identity development pressures, and grapple with unexpected competency demands. In school and at work, early-career engineersmight additionally encounter calls to be more entre/intrapreneurial, multidisciplinary, innovative, culturally competent, and/or socially conscious – but without acknowledging that some of these attributes may conflict or poorly alignwith certain industries or job roles. Further, rapid changes in technology, markets, organizational structures, and demographics – to name just a few – continue to reshape and transform engineering work across all career stages. Against this complex and ever-changing backdrop, research investigating the actual lived experiences of early-career engineers helps explore the relationships between engineering education and practice, including preparation of engineering students for the realities of entering the workforce. Calls for study of this important segment of engineers’ careers have appeared in the literature as early as the 1980s, with Sara Rynes1 noting, in her study of early-career engineers transitioning to manager positions, how it was “curious that so little research has examined engineers at earlier career stages.” Since then, an increasing number of researchers have published studies on early career engineering practice; however, such research has remained somewhat limited in scope due to the complexities of the space, the changing demographics of engineering students, and the dynamic nature of engineering practice. For example, Nadya Fouad and colleagues2 identified a lack of focus on the early-career years in research on women engineers’ persistence, while Reed Stevens, Aditya Johri, and Kevin O’Connor3 observed a need for research that “examines directly the specific learning processes of engineers making the transition from school to work.” Even within Engineering Studies, where a substantial body of work has attended to engineering formation and engineering work, articles have not particularly focused on the continuation of engineering formation after graduation or the influence of engineering work on organizational newcomers, save for a few exceptions.4 The articles in this special theme issue help narrow the gap in work on early-career engineering practice and the engineering school-to-work transition by further examining the dynamic and complex day-to-day realities of early-career engineeringwork. These insights, in turn, offer a deeper understanding of and support for the training of current and future engineering professionals. The impetus for this special issue originated at a 2018 National