Finding: The vast majority of those formally trained in engineering work in occupations that draw heavily on their technical and professional engineering knowledge and skills. Their professional and problem-solving skills are also used in occupations with little connection to the more technical aspects of engineering. Engineers work in many different industries and across all sectors of society.

Finding: Engineers typically perform a variety of tasks in their jobs—management of people or projects; development and design; and computer programming, production, and quality management. Management is a major component of engineering work, as are computing and the design of equipment, processes, structures, and/or physical or computational models.

Finding: Engineering graduates working in engineering, engineering-proximate, and non-engineering-related occupations typically have higher career earnings than their peers with bachelor’s degrees in other fields, the lowest rate of unemployment (less than 3 percent) of all bachelor’s degree holders, and considerable career flexibility.

Finding: Engineering graduates working in engineering, engineering-proximate, and non-engineering-related occupations typically have high levels of career and work satisfaction.

Finding: Although some disciplines have greater diversity than others, overall the US engineering workforce remains characterized by limited gender, ethnic, and racial diversity. White and Asian males dominate the makeup of this workforce, while women, African Americans, American Indians/Alaska Natives, and Hispanics of any race remain significantly underrepresented.

Finding: Efforts to increase the representation of women and other underrepresented groups in engineering have improved diversity in some disciplines but overall have proven to be less effective than desired.

Finding: There are at least two compelling reasons why the nation should be concerned about engineering’s diversity challenge: the creativity and innovation costs of unused skills and talent, and equity/social justice.

Finding: Many interrelated internal and external (personal and societal or cultural) factors influence the decision making of students and graduates in ways that contribute to engineering’s diversity challenge.

Finding: The low numbers of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering education and the engineering workforce dictate that the pathways and motivations of every group be considered fully and that the entire engineering community—educators, employers, research funders, policymakers, and engineering professionals—work collaboratively to improve diversity.

Finding: Because people with diverse gender and racial/ethnic identities may have different motivations and pathways in engineering, it is imperative to consider which educational and programmatic interventions are most effective in welcoming, supporting, and advancing those from underrepresented backgrounds. It is essential to continue developing, implementing, and evaluating well-designed educational and training interventions to both attract and retain women and underrepresented minorities and to support all individuals in engineering. It is equally important to change the perceived and real culture(s) of engineering to welcome all individuals regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or background. Recognition of bias, support for work-life balance, and equal opportunity for training and advancement will help create a supportive environment for all employees.

Recommendation 1: Engineering deans, department chairs, and faculty, K–12 teachers and administrators, and engineering professionals in industry and government who work with educators at any level should make concerted efforts to foster an inclusive, welcoming climate/culture for all students interested in engineering and STEM more broadly, including efforts to recognize and address implicit and explicit bias in their employees and to create a more welcoming and inclusive engineering culture.

Recommendation 2: Organizations that employ engineers should examine their promotion practices and pay to ensure that they are equitable across gender, race, ethnicity, and other demographics. In addition, to promote the job satisfaction, company commitment, and retention of their engineering workforce, companies should recognize and address implicit and explicit bias in their employees and work to create a more welcoming and inclusive engineering culture.

Recommendation 3: Researchers, educators, employers, public and private funders, and policymakers should consider the interplay of multiple internal and external influences over time on an individual’s educational and career decisions when developing interventions to increase the representation of all populations in engineering. Informed by this systems perspective, these and other stakeholders in the nation’s engineering education and workforce enterprise should work together to develop, test, and coordinate innovative, mutually reinforcing initiatives that produce a significant, positive, collective impact on engineering’s diversity challenge rather than pursuing many individual, discrete, largely disconnected/isolated, and low-impact initiatives.

Finding: Lack of knowledge about the profession is a significant barrier for potential engineers from populations underrepresented in engineering. Messages that describe engineering as a field that involves understanding, defining, and solving important societal problems using a mix of technical and professional skills, interdisciplinary work, social consciousness, creativity, and multicultural understanding impart knowledge of the field to all students, and seem to be particularly important for female and underrepresented minority (URM; African Americans, American Indians/Alaska Natives, and Hispanics of any race) students, who otherwise may not see engineering as a viable option for themselves.

Recommendation 4: Engineering faculty, professional societies, employers, and other engineering outreach organizations should provide K–12 students, their families, and K–12 educators and guidance counselors with current, accurate information about engineering, both to counter inaccurate stereotypes of the nature of engineering work and the people who do it and to prepare students to navigate their education and enter the workforce.

Recommendation 5: Engineering professional societies, employers, and other engineering outreach organizations should work with families, K–12 educators, and guidance counselors to cultivate all students’ interest in exploring an engineering major and career by communicating that engineering develops professional as well as technical skills and equips graduates to do interesting work in a wide range of occupations, help define and solve important problems for people and society, and make a positive difference in the world. In addition, K–12 educators and guidance counselors should help families of K–12 students in particular understand the utility and rewards of an engineering degree, such as the versatility of the technical and professional skills learned, access to many different careers, and high initial and lifelong salaries.

Recommendation 6: All who are involved in K–12 teacher training and professional development—such as schools of education, engineering faculty, professional societies, and K–12 administrators—should encourage and support K–12 STEM educators’ efforts to use inclusive teaching practices that create safe and inclusive learning environments to support and actively engage students from different backgrounds.

Finding: The disciplinary foundations of engineering are expanding with the influence and incorporation of computing, the life sciences, the social and behavioral sciences, business management concepts and skills, and entrepreneurship. In particular, computing and data science knowledge and skills are increasingly fundamental to a range of engineering applications; computing occupations employ over 15 percent of all engineering graduates and are projected to grow rapidly over the coming decade. Engineering schools need to recognize and support this interaction between engineering and computer science in all disciplines, whether with more required courses for all majors or the teaching of computing skills as part of discipline-specific courses.

Finding: Beyond strong technical skills, more and more employers expect engineering graduates to have experience and competence in professional areas such as creativity and design, oral and written communication, teamwork and leadership, interdisciplinary thinking, business management and entrepreneurship, and multicultural understanding.

Finding: Advances in understanding of how people learn engineering, corresponding evidence-based innovations in pedagogy and technological tools for the education of engineers, and the digital fluency of incoming generations of students are all creating new needs and opportunities for engineering education to adapt. These curricular changes both improve graduates’ professional and lifelong learning skills and attract more women and underrepresented minorities to the field.

Finding: Given trends in global markets for engineering talent and the pace of change in technology, business practices, and other areas, engineers must be prepared to pursue lifelong learning activities, including online programs, to keep current their technical and professional skills and knowledge.

Recommendation 7: Engineering deans, department chairs, and faculty should acknowledge computing and computer science (CS) as a foundational knowledge and skill domain of modern engineering education and practice across all disciplines, and continue to incorporate computing/CS more pervasively into engineering degree programs.

Recommendation 8: Engineering deans, department chairs, and senior faculty should promote and reward the adoption of evidence-based best practices in engineering pedagogy, including active and experiential learning and other student-centered practices that promote real-world applications of STEM concepts to complex sociotechnical problems like those that engineers will face in their work.

Recommendation 9: Engineering deans, department chairs, and faculty should strengthen partnerships with industry and other employers to make design courses and high-quality “real-world” engineering experiences—including internships, co-ops, mentored research projects, and other curricular and cocurricular activities and programs (e.g., Engineers Without Borders, Engineering Projects in Community Service [EPICS], the NAE Grand Challenges Scholars Program)—available to students as an integral part of all undergraduate engineering programs. These educational elements help develop students’ professional and technical skills while providing a window on the active application of engineering knowledge and skills in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors.

Recommendation 10: Engineering deans, department chairs, and faculty should adapt teaching and career guidance to better reflect the broad spectrum of engineering, engineering-proximate, and non-engineering occupations available to engineering graduates. To this end, they should engage (1) educators on curricular and cocurricular options and adaptations and (2) alumni who work in engineering, engineering-proximate, and non-engineering occupations and those who employ them to advise students on career options in the many different industries, jobs, and sectors where engineering knowledge and skills are valued and can be applied.

Recommendation 11: Engineering deans, department chairs, and faculty should work closely with employers and engineering professional societies to (1) identify and advance the desired professional and technical skills of working engineering professionals, by offering or supporting continuing education to expand skills and knowledge, and (2) enhance the currency and quality of faculty teaching by supporting faculty sabbaticals with engineering employers, the use of adjunct faculty drawn from the ranks of working engineers, faculty mentoring of undergraduate design projects involving engineering employer sponsors, or seminar series about cutting-edge technologies and advances in engineering pedagogy.

Finding: Foreign-born students on temporary visas have long constituted a large share of US engineering school enrollments at the graduate level, whereas the rapid growth of foreign-born temporary resident student enrollments in undergraduate engineering programs is more recent. Accordingly, the impacts of foreign student enrollments have been studied more extensively at the graduate level than at the undergraduate level. Additional data gathering and research are needed on the nature and impact of foreign-born temporary resident student enrollments in US engineering programs, especially at the undergraduate level.

Recommendation 12: Universities, statistical agencies, and the higher education research community should monitor and evaluate the effects of growing enrollment of foreign-born students on temporary visas in engineering, particularly at the undergraduate level, on the educational and career choices as well as the engineering education experiences of both domestic and foreign students, and on host institutions of higher learning.

Finding: National survey-based datasets provide only limited insight into the dynamics of the market for engineering skills and knowledge, its connections to the educational enterprise, and broader implications.

Finding: Despite some challenges to their use, administrative data can both supplement survey data and offer a completely new source of data to provide a more complete picture of the education, career paths, and training of engineers.

Recommendation 13: Researchers and policymakers should work with institutions of higher education, federal, state, and local government agencies, and other entities that hold administrative data to identify and build on administrative data resources to establish a better empirical foundation for research on the educational and career paths of engineers using a wide variety of definitions of what it means to be an engineer. Specifically, they should:

• Identify resources to collect and integrate longitudinal administrative records from university transcript data and data from statistical agencies.
• Use the data for characterizing student educational pathways (including student retention in higher education), employment choices, earnings and employment dynamics, and the economic returns to the costs of an engineering degree.
• Maintain the confidential data in secure environments for analysis by authorized researchers for the purposes of building a robust evidence base to inform policy.