The U.S. will continue to see demand for engineers outpacing the supply of new engineering graduates, due to a variety of factors: an annual gap of approximately 18,000 engineers retiring from versus entering the workforce, the reduced number of U.S.-trained engineers remaining in the U.S. due to visa policy changes, and declining enrollment of students.
These shifts affecting the engineering workforce highlight the importance of retaining students participating in engineering studies through their successful entry into the workforce.
The National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education has awarded $187,321 to Jennifer Cross, assistant dean of recruitment and assessment, and Bryan Norman, senior associate academic dean, with the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering (WCOE) to research strategies for developing integrated resilience in engineering departments, including developing a system dynamics model that can be used by engineering programs across the country.
Student success is driven by a variety of variables ranging from personal factors like family support, mental health, academic preparedness, and access to resources as well as factors that affect their educational program like changes in funding resources or stressors on facilities and work-life balance. These latter factors largely stem from the organizational systems that serve students, including the departments in which they reside. This means there is a great need for developing organizational resilience in engineering departments so that they can better support student success.
“Students today, and I think people in general, are operating with higher levels of stress as their baseline than what we’ve seen in the past,” said Norman. “The solution is not about trying to remove every stressor, but to develop in our engineering programs the resources that equip students to meet and overcome the adversity they face. That is a skill with lifelong reward.”
Organizational resilience is defined by the International Standard Organization (2017) “as the ability of an organization to absorb and adapt in a changing environment” to enable it to deliver its objectives and to survive and prosper.
Cross and Norman will be collaborating with colleagues at the University of Central Florida and at the College of Charleston to evaluate the factors that affect organizational resilience in engineering departments and how those impact not just the department, but also its employees as well as the students served. This will be used to develop and test a systems model of engineering department resilience and design strategies for increasing resilience across all levels.
“This is one of the first studies that will look at these multiple levels within a higher education organization to determine what factors affect resilience, as well as what adjustments bring about a positive response,” explained Cross. “Our goal is to determine what vulnerabilities need to be addressed and then to give engineering departments the tools to adapt quickly and effectively.”
As a primary output of the research, the researchers will develop a multi-level system dynamics model and simulation tool that engineering departments can use to evaluate their own capacity to respond in various scenarios that affect their organizational resilience as well as their students’ resilience.
“As we develop these tools,” added Cross, “we will create a learning community so that programs can share their experiences with the tools as well as the strategies that have been successful.”