What’s Happening to Our Freshout Engineers?

Editor's Notes

• #2: In 2012, the U.S. graduated 62K engineers from its colleges and universitiesPaid them $62K annually. Industry slang calls these newly graduated and hired engineers “freshouts.”Took them 6 months to 5 years to come up to speed.How decrease rampup time for these freshouts?If you’re an engineer trying to answer a question like this, youSpecify the problemDetermine its root causesTake corrective actionIf you’re a performance improvement person, youConduct an environmental scan, gap analysis, and organizational analysis.Conduct a cause analysisSelect, design, develop solutionsThank you for your interest in our efforts to apply performance improvement to engineer better engineers!
• #3: Amy, Tony, and I welcome you to this sessionYou can download slides here, SlideShare, and on the conference app.
• #4: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded this exploratory work.This is the project team.
• #6: Spinks conducted interviews and administered a survey. He found that employers in the UK ware “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with their ability to recruit appropriately skilled engineering graduates from UK universities.2Hoey and Gardner surveyed North Carolina State alumni and their employers. Alums rated their university preparation for the workplace lower than their employers. Better at technical skills than others.Jonassen and colleagues found that the problems that appear in engineering texts have little to do with those that engineers tackle in the workplace.Grant and Dickson worked instigated the preparation of chemical engineers in the UK. Of 26 skills required for the workplace, graduates rated their preparation for 24 as insufficient.Korte, Sheppard and colleagues were part of a big NSF study looking at engineering practice in universities and in the workplace. In this study, they looked at the socialization of freshout engineers, noting that freshouts spent a lot of time coming up to speed on engineering processes in the workplace that differed from those in school. Workplace involved greater complexity, ambiguity, and subjectivity.Trevelyan and colleagues have been investigating novice engineers and their workplace readiness in Australia and Asia. In one study, they investigated a cohort of almost 200 graduating engineers as they made their way into the workplace. Based on interviews, they identified 10 major competencies and 85 corresponding practices. Of them, freshouts spent 60% of time coordinating.ABET is the accrediting body for engineering colleges. Passow looked at the ABET accreditation criteria that graduates found most useful in the workplace. They rated teaming, data analysis, problem solving, and communications between Quite and extremely important.
• #10: In a UK study, Spinks compared undergraduate education requirements to the needs of the engineering industry. Many graduate engineers are likely to find themselves in roles which do not necessarily involve hands-on specialist engineering.Korte and colleagues found a lot more ambiguity in real-world engineering. What new engineers perceived and learned about engineering work depended their interactions with coworkers in their work groups. Morgan and Gorman reported that engineering firms are hiring for a broader skill set. They note it’s hard to pack business acumen, managerial know-how, communication skills and team-working ability into an already packed curriculum. Anderson and colleagues investigated misalignment between engineering education and professional practice. Report that curricula in high school and college give students an incomplete picture of engineering work and what engineers do and often do not develop the full skill set needed to successfully execute increasingly complex, interdisciplinary, and international projects in the engineering workplace. Effective engineers value communication, problem-solving, teamwork, ethics, life-long learning, and business skills. Many of them note that their undergraduate education did not always prepare them well in these areasDuderstadt: “we are attempting to educate 21st-century engineers with a 2Oth-century curriculum taught in 19th-century institutions.Winters and colleagues looked from freshman past graduation. Over time, communication skills generally increased in importance while teamwork skills decreased.
• #11: LONG LIVEDIn the past, it was onboarding. A day or a week of boring and often useless stuff. Few useful gems buried in minutiae. That’s changing as organizations want improve recruitment, streamline time to competence, and retain expensive new assets.Dai & De Meuse contend onboarding is about Performance Proficiency, people/relationships, politics, language/communication, organizational vision and values, history/traditions/customs.Bradt & Vonnegut have a book on this topic.Roethle completed a thesis using a meta-analysis to investigate effective onboarding in small engineering companies and then created an onboarding process guideline.Jones describes virtual onboarding.SUPPORTMontesano reported that one-third of employers are not providing formal orientation programs.Korte & Lim claim onboarding, orientation, and socialization are synonymous. It’s about newbies fitting into organizational and organizations adjusting to the newbies. Onboarding is learning about and integrating into the social networks that make up the workplace. Driven by quality of relationships with managers and co-workers.