Research: Collaborative Research: Non-Academic Career Paths of Master’s and PhD Engineers

Most engineering Master’s and PhD graduates will enter careers in sectors such as industry and government, yet research and resources focused on graduate education have historically focused on preparation of future faculty members in academia. This project will meet the call for enhancing the professional preparation of engineers by focusing on non-academic career pathways of both Master’s and PhD students in engineering.

Advanced engineering degrees are becoming increasingly important in these non-academic sectors for both individual career trajectories as well as for continued competitiveness within the global innovation landscape. The project will identify how graduate programs can better support students for these careers so that they may successfully and quickly make contributions in their new positions.

Additionally, both industry and government have emphasized the need to broaden participation in engineering, and this project will pay particular attention to the experiences of how minoritized graduate students may be best supported on their career paths. The project aligns closely with the goals of the Professional Formation of Engineers funding program “to create and support an innovative and inclusive engineering profession for the 21st century.” At its core, the project aims to understand and identify ways to enhance the professional formation of engineers at the graduate level so that they are best prepared to transition successfully into the non-academic workforce.

This project will seek to understand: 1) how recent alumni of engineering graduate programs describe being exposed to, preparing for, and making decisions about non-academic careers, and 2) how engineering faculty, staff, and administrators support students to prepare for such careers. The project will use an ecological theoretical framework to organize data collection and analyses, which will allow the investigators to consider individual decisions within broader systems and environmental factors that influence engineering graduates’ pursuit of non-academic careers.

The project will triangulate multiple data sources to understand the issue from different perspectives. First, the investigators will conduct national-scale quantitative analyses of non-academic career pathways in engineering using the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) and Survey of Doctoral Recipients (SDR) and provide benchmarking data to all institutions with engineering graduate students.

Second, the investigators have purposively sampled four institutions that are active members of multiple engineering research centers (ERCs) and/or Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRCs) and, as such, are well positioned to support career pathways for engineering graduate students beyond the academy. This project will investigate experiences of alumni, center directors, and faculty to understand how these institutions and programs prepare engineering graduates for non-academic careers and to gain insight on how graduates make career decisions.

The sampling strategy to focus on Centers is a unique strategy that purposefully collects new data from NSF-supported collaborations that theoretically put students in research spaces that transcend the boundaries of academia. Minority-serving institutions are intentionally included in the sample to understand how minoritized graduate students in particular can be best supported.

Prior work on PhD students has shown that despite many calls from industry and the government that broadening participation is needed, women and students from underrepresented minority groups still are more likely than their white, male peers to have no job offers at the time of graduation. Third, based on findings from that initial sample, the project will generate and administer questionnaires to graduates, directors, and faculty at 44 additional institutions leveraging the ERC/IUCRC network as a sampling mechanism.

This step will increase the representativeness of the sample and enable exploration of differences across institutions, disciplines, and ERC/IUCRCs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.