It’s college graduation season, when commencement speakers encourage graduates to be bold, innovative and fearless as graduates vacillate between optimism and uncertainty about their future.

For young engineers entering the workforce, the outlook appears good: Job openings are projected to climb to 11% by 2023 as employers add positions and baby boomers retire.

But are these early-career engineers prepared to practice in the real world? It depends on whom you ask.

Employers often assert that the next generation of engineers is short on communication skills, experience outside the classroom and knowledge about how engineered products and devices are made and work. Engineering colleges, meanwhile, are adapting curriculum and teaching styles as companies seek a well-trained workforce in an evolving marketplace.

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These stakeholders share in the responsibility of forming engineering’s future, but perennial challenges persist over the most effective ways to do so.

A Different Breed

Yannis Yortsos says students are “remarkably mature on the things they want to do.”Yannis Yortsos says students are “remarkably mature on the things they want to do.”As the first generation to be raised on the Internet and smart phones, millennials enter college with an unprecedented savvy in all things technological. Yannis Yortsos, dean of the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, calls students “remarkably mature on the things they want to do.”

Not only are students well informed and connected through social media, but “solving big problems is appealing to them,” Yortsos says.

Being so technologically advanced has its drawbacks, however. For one, an overdependence on technology “leads to a student population that is not as experienced in the realities of how things are actually made and work,” says name="m_-7170168775695012266_m_269436107299015">Thomas Perry, P.E., director of engineering education at ASME.

Employers have found that young engineers who are so fluid in their use and consumption of technology tend to get bored easily. They seek complexities and challenges on the job that align with their interests. That includes “wanting to have different experiences at a fairly regular pace,” says Brian Fortney, global business manager for workforce and training services at Rockwell Automation.

Brian Fortney, global business manager for workforce and training services, Rockwell Automation.Brian Fortney, global business manager for workforce and training services, Rockwell Automation.Engineering colleges are trying to respond to this fundamental shift in learning style while keeping abreast of employers’ demands regarding an entry-level workforce. In lieu of the traditional lecture with face-to-face contact in the classroom, many students today prefer a blend of classroom work, small group activities and individual online learning.

“What they want in the end is material put in front of them and a good responsible source to answer their questions,” says Leo Kempel, dean of Michigan State University’s College of Engineering. And they want that feedback quickly.

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Because of such expectations, educators “need to chop material up into smaller bite-size pieces,” Kempel says. Instead of a single 50-minute lecture, instructors are delivering three 20-minute units in one course. (Read “Beyond Theory: Bringing Engineering Experience to the Classroom.”)

Lifetime Learners

Some employers report a disconnection between what they want from the early career engineer and what they get. Nick Tebeau, manager of vision solutions at Leoni Engineering Products & Services Inc., has been responsible for hiring staff for the last nine years. The majority of candidates are recently graduated electrical engineers.

Tebeau says he looks for three factors when interviewing potential employees: the ability to learn, the desire to learn and a great attitude. However, he feels that engineering schools aren’t impressing upon their students the importance of learning to learn.

Nick Tebeau, manager of vision solutions at Leoni Engineering Products & Services Inc.Nick Tebeau, manager of vision solutions at Leoni Engineering Products & Services Inc.“When I ask candidates to show or tell me examples of how they’re able to learn on their own, it’s like they’ve never heard of this concept,” he says.

It’s a refrain heard many times in the engineering community. Released in 2012, ASME’s Vision 2030 Study gathered input from 1,400 industrial supervisors, 1,100 early-career engineers and 80 mechanical engineering departments to evaluate the strengths and developmental needs of entry-level mechanical engineers and the engineering curriculum itself. Engineering managers believed that young engineers’ three biggest areas of weakness were practical experience, or how devices are made and work; oral and written communication; and engineering codes and standards.

Meanwhile, the engineers themselves identified practical experience and engineering codes, in addition to overall systems perspective, as their biggest limitations. Responding educators agreed with the engineers’ assessment on systems perspective and listed new technical fundamentals as the second largest disadvantage.

“You can’t do scalable engineering by yourself,” says Thomas Perry, P.E.“You can’t do scalable engineering by yourself,” says Thomas Perry, P.E.“One thing that is not addressed sufficiently enough in undergraduate programs is the notion that you can’t just go out and build something by yourself and take it to market,” ASME’s Perry says. “It’s got to work within the parameters of existing systems, safety and other industry and government codes and standards.” What’s more, these can vary across the global economy.

Another skill that early career engineers need to strengthen is playing well with diverse groups. Doing so means being able to both lead and be a part of collaborative teams. After all, “you can’t do scalable engineering by yourself,” Perry says. And without diverse inputs, he says, you may well not even understand the problem you are trying to solve or the market you are trying to serve.

Indeed, engineers don’t reside on islands anymore. USC’s Yortsos sees a burgeoning multidisciplinary approach through a concept he calls “engineering plus.” With engineering plus, students pursue classes or extracurricular activities outside of engineering to become better equipped to address real-world problems.

At MSU, the engineering curriculum emphasizes interpersonal skills “because engineers are going to be spending upwards of half their time on the job communicating,” Kempel says. Students regularly give presentations on their work, develop technical write-ups and work together in teams.

The ability to communicate with clarity in critical situations — and across different disciplines — can distinguish an engineer from his or her peers. Because of the networked nature of modern manufacturing facilities, for instance, “the operations tech will be working with IT to solve the issue of a line going down,” Fortney says. “You’re learning how to speak multiple languages.”

Leo Kempel, dean of Michigan State University’s College of Engineering.Leo Kempel, dean of Michigan State University’s College of Engineering.When interviewing candidates, Tebeau looks at their extracurricular activities to evaluate their ability to learn. He once interviewed a new college graduate whose grades weren’t the best, but he started talking about how he built a 3D printer, Tebeau says. “And you start to get a sense of, ‘OK, this guy figured out on his own how to do this.’”

Prepping for the Real World

Over the last several years, ASME has advocated that bachelor degree programs in engineering increase the amount of design-build experience across all four years, not just as a capstone design project.

MSU’s College of Engineering, for example, strives to do just that by providing what it calls a “design intensive” education. In addition to the requisite math and science skills, students need to know how to apply those tools in practice.

“From a technological standpoint, we want students to have no fear,” Kempel says. The way to do that is weaving design challenges throughout the curriculum “from the very first day all the way through the capstone design projects.”

In April 2016, Michigan State hosted its largest-ever Design Day for 276 teams and 1,138 students. Design Day is the culmination of 15-week capstone courses that provide a platform for students to apply the knowledge and experiences gained throughout their engineering education. The event also allowed first-year engineering students to demonstrate their skills and served as a recruiting tool for high schoolers.

Electrical engineering students discuss their project with visitors at the 2016 MSU Design Day. Image source: MSUElectrical engineering students discuss their project with visitors at the 2016 MSU Design Day. Image source: MSUTo prepare students to solve the engineering problems facing society in the coming years, USC’s Yortsos helped create the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge Scholars Program. The education model features five components: hands-on project or research experience, interdisciplinary curriculum, entrepreneurship, global awareness and service learning. More than 20 U.S. engineering schools have committed to graduating a number of such engineers in the foreseeable future.

Despite the efforts of engineering colleges, employers report that candidates continue to come up short on expectations and experience. On the electrical engineering front, for example, Leoni’s Tebeau says that new engineers are more likely to be working with existing electronics or control systems rather than developing new products. But current engineering education reflects the opposite.

“Students have spent half their college career on how to design a circuit but maybe only a class on troubleshooting systems that are already created,” he says. “Electrical troubleshooting is something we have to teach all of our engineers.“

Some colleges make a point to temper students’ expectations about the realities of the engineering profession, regardless of which discipline they pursue. Kempel says that although many students enter MSU’s engineering program wanting to be the design engineer who creates the next big product or project, “they leave knowing that job opportunities are much more complex and diverse.”

Faculty also emphasize the importance of internships and career flexibility. “We teach our students to be prepared to reinvent themselves every few years, and to seize the opportunities in front of them, because they never know what the future holds in terms of the needs of a company, or of society,” Kempel says.

(Read “Make the Most of Your Engineering Internship.”)

It’s not just employers who are facing frustrations in filling engineering positions with qualified candidates. The biggest challenge for engineering colleges, according to Kempel, is having enough time in the curriculum and internship experiences to prepare students for the “expanding base of knowledge that employers expect engineers to have coming into the workplace.”

What’s more, colleges are fielding requests from engineering trade organizations to hire more faculty with significant industry experience. But that runs in contrast to the reality of faculty staffing and career success models in academia, which “are guided almost exclusively toward research productivity potential,” ASME’s Perry says. “Tenure track means that you have got seven years to demonstrate your research capability and bring in funding from the federal government, or you lose your job.”

Perry acknowledges that publicly funded research is not only in the national interest but of commercial interests as well. In the industry-practice preparation of entry-level engineers, however, persuading someone who has a Master’s degree or even a PhD and 20 years of industry experience to take a pay cut to teach at a university “where they could potentially be regarded as second-class in the academic social hierarchy” isn’t the easiest sell, he says.

To that end, ASME has called on industry to support colleges of engineering by funding sustainable Professors of Practice positions through endowments. These positions, Perry says, “strengthen the collective level of contemporary industry experience and perspective of the faculty” enabling more students to learn first-hand from highly experienced engineering practitioners.

For all the perceived shortcomings of early-career engineers and their alma maters, most employers recognize their strengths and plan to put them to good use.

“This millennial generation sees things in a much more systematic way,” Rockwell Automation’s Fortney says. “They can offer assistance outside of just their specific competence area.”