Preferred Roles of Industrial Engineering and Management Students - An exploratory European analysis

Preferred Roles of Industrial Engineering and Management Students-AnexploratoryEuropeananalysis

2 Facultyof Engineering Technology, Leuven Engineering & ScienceEducation Centre, KU Leuven, Belgium

Email: viktoria.heyen@estiem.org,maria.serodio@estiem.org, ricardo.oliveira@estiem.org, ece.ozdag@estiem.org, sofie.craps@kuleuven.be

Abstract

The European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management (ESTIEM) is a non-profit organization of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) students, founded in 1990 to promote the connection between students, companies, and professors by its activities and initiatives. Through its partnership with the European-funded “Professional Roles and Employability of Future EngineeRs” (PREFER) project, whose objective is to allow students to better understand what engineers do and what kind of engineers they want to be, ESTIEM started a research to better understand the preferred engineeringrolesofstudentsinseveraluniversitiesinEurope.InthePREFERproject,threeprofessionalrolesforearlycareer engineers-ProductLeadership(focusingonradicalinnovation),OperationalExcellence(focusingonprocessoptimisation) and Customer Intimacy (focusing on tailored solutions) - have been identified. Furthermore, competencies essential to be successful in those roles have been associated with them. Based on this model, two tests for engineering students were developed including the PREFER Explore test, which identifies the preference of the engineering roles. Understanding the importance of knowing the competencies needed for future engineers, the goal of the research is to map the possible differences in regard to the preferred roles among IEM students in Europe. This paper reports the findings of the Explore test run among six universities in Europe that are members of the ESTIEM network (Lisbon, Porto, Liège, İstanbul-Boğaziçi, Eindhoven and Saint-Petersburg). From those, Bachelor and Master students in IEM were invited, regardless of their association with ESTIEM (n=179). Findings indicate that the roles preference vary inside each university, even though the population shares the same educational background, and throughout the different European universities analysed. Furthermore, it explores the potential factors influencing those preferences based on students’ insights and previous research conducted by ESTIEM.

Keywords: Engineering roles, Engineering education, Industrial Engineering and Management.

1 Introduction

The transition from academic life to the labour market is difficult for most of the students and it is the responsibility of higher education professionals to ensure a smooth transition. The factors explaining this difficult transition are various and among those we can underline the fact that students have generally wrong expectations or are not aware of what they could or would like to do.

As a European network, great differences in the quality of the education were noticed and also the emphasis professors put on the preparation of their students for their future careers are different. For example, in some universities students are in contact with the industry through workshops or internships from the beginning of their studies, whereas in other students barely get in contact with the industry at the time of graduation. Besides the general knowledge students acquire during their studies, also called hard skills, there is an increasing demand from the industry in more transversal knowledge such as communication skills, teamwork, organization, etc. -theso-called soft skills. Itisoften difficult for studentsto clearly determinewhich softskills they need to acquire or improve. Soft skills are often overlooked by universities, so some students turn into student associations, junior enterprises or networks, such as European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management (ESTIEM), to develop those.

The number of reasons why engineering students need to be well-informed regarding their possible future careers is enormous. By helping young engineers to discover who they are in and by raising awareness of the differentprofessionalrolestheycantakeonearlyintheircareer,theywouldbebetterpreparedtofitthelabour market requirements.

As so, the purpose of this study is to make a European analysis of the role distribution inside and between different European universities. This study contributes to the existing literature and research, as it is the first time that it is applied in a European context of industrial and management engineering.

The remainder of this paper is divided into four sections. The next section explores the existing literature on thetopicofengineers’roleaswellasthebackgroundsofESTIEMandPREFER.Subsequently,themethodology applied to collect the data will be presented. Thereafter, the results and an analysis of those are provided. Finally, a discussion of the results and a conclusion are proposed.

2 Importanceof role understanding in the engineeringprofession

The following section first presents an overview of the available literature on the topic of role definition in the engineering profession. Then, a generaldescription of ESTIEM,thenetworkwhich conducted thisstudywillbe provided. Third, the Professional Roles and Employability of Future EngineeRs (PREFER) project, its aim and applicationaredescribedasitisusedasthetheoreticalframeworktoinvestigateprofessionalpreferences.The section finishes by the formulation of the research questions taking into account the previously described literature and background of the study.

2.1 Literature review

The transition from higher education into the labour market is something most young graduates find difficult astheydon’tknowwhattoexpectandwhattheirworthis.Inhisempiricalanalysis,Tomlinson(2007)discusses how students’ orientations have an influence on the choice of their future work and employability and concludes that besides developing competencies, students also need to develop their own identity.

In the engineering field, Bennett and Male (2017) suggest that engineering students need to explore the roles of engineers and their own selves in order to be able to make the best decision for their future career. Higher education institutionsrecognizetheir responsibilityin guiding students inthe important decision that thefirst jobrepresents(Burkeetal.2017;NationalAcademyofEngineering2018).Nonetheless,thisisnotaneasytask, as demonstrated by Bennett and Male (2017), because even after the completion of their bachelor’s degree, engineering students remain unaware of what they can expect for their future careers. This is further emphasizedastheengineeringfieldisoftenseenastechnical,ratherthanfocussingontheprofessionalaspects of the profession (Brunhaver et al. 2018).

It may be of no surprise then that young graduates can experience a gap between what they expect and their firstexperience(Chan,Zhao,andLuk2017).Thisgapcanalso,unfortunately,leadtoanegativejobsatisfaction as demonstrated by Jusoh, Simun, and Chong (2011), who showed that communication, decision making, and motivation are three important aspects influencing one’s job satisfaction.

Engineers have the possibility to enter in a wide variety of sectors after their graduation. This offers a lot of differentperspectivesto theyoung graduatesbut also leadsto a vagueunderstanding of theirpossiblefuture career or the role they can take on when entering the labour market. Although, knowing the world of work eases the process of career decision making and job transition (Kracke, 2002; Meijers et al., 2013), research on professional roles for early engineers is scarce. The existing literature on engineers’ professional roles is rare and fails to clearly address the variety of the job market. Based on a systematic literature review, Craps et al. (2020) proposed a model aiming to help engineering students understand their professional identity and to avoid the skills mismatch. Craps et al. (2020) not only expanded the literature on professional roles in engineering but demonstrated that the roles reflect the overall expectations of the work field. The model was further developed into a competency model validated in industry and education.

Theconcern of helping students and young graduates in finding out who they are asprofessionals isnot new. Previousresearch clearlyaims to help students to direct their career path, whileexactly knowing whattheyare searchingfor.Basedonthis,thecurrentresearchaimstoapplytheframeworkdevelopedbyCrapsetal.(2021) in a European context focussing on industrial and management engineers.

2.2 ESTIEM

TheEuropeanStudentsofIndustrialEngineeringandManagement(ESTIEM),foundedin1990,bringstogether studentsinIndustrialEngineeringandManagement(IEM)from74differentuniversitiesinEurope,representing a total of 26 countries. ESTIEM is represented in each of these universities by a student’s union including a corresponding Local Representative that makes the bridge between the local and European association. This networkhastheaim of connecting thestudentsof IEM with universities, companiesand institutionsoperating around IEM, as well as to develop them in a personal and professional way. As so, its main activities consist of events in the areas of academic, career, personal and intercultural development. ESTIEM puts a high emphasis on education and social and environmental responsibility, as well as trying to provide necessary skills and experience for students to get prepared for their future careers.

Recently, in 2020, ESTIEM started research projects focusing on IEM. The Curricula Database Project aims to classify IEM bachelor’s degrees from our partner universities. In order to do so, a framework has been developed in collaboration with professors from the European Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management (EPIEM). This framework offers five main scope of areas (sciences, engineering, industrial engineering and management, management, others) and each of those are also divided into sub-areas which allowa deep understanding of thecomposition of IEM degrees. The Career AnalysisProjectaimsto depict the career path ofIEM graduates. Aframeworkhasbeendevelopedby merging theknowledgeof one memberof theESTIEMAlumninetworkwiththeNACEframework, thestatistical classification ofeconomicactivitiesinthe European Community. Based on that, a survey was conducted in the Alumni network and analysis on the preferred career paths were made showing that IEM students adopt a wide variety of options and common patterns can be observed in some regions. The results of the current study, reported in this paper, will be interpretedwithinthefindingsofbothESTIEMresearchprojects,theCurriculaDatabaseProjectandtheCareer Analysis Project. We further refer to these projects as resp. academic context and professional context.

2.3 PREFER

Within the multidisciplinary engineering scenario, understanding the different profiles and competencies is a criticalsuccessfactorthatsetsthefoundationsforearlyprofessionaldevelopmentandcareergrowth(Lauwers, Bonte and Vanmaercke 2013).

The positive impact of acquiring this knowledge during the academic journey, as well as the gap of specific literatureonthefieldofprofessionalrolesforengineers(Craps,Pinxten,KnipprathandLangie2020),motivated the study and development of a model known as Professional Roles Model for Future Engineers (PREFER model) (Craps, Pinxten, Knipprath and Langie 2021), combining the preliminary models presented in previous research conducted on this subject (Spinks, Silburn and Birchall 2007; Hofland, Pinxten, Wauters and Langie 2015). The result model is presented in Figure 1.

The PREFER model describes three roles - Product Leadership, Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy - that engineers can take on early in their career (Craps et al., 2021). For each role, industry indicated what competencies are required. The reflective instrument acknowledges that an engineering career is determined through close interactions of the identified areas instead of a mutual exclusive relationship of a single one.

Focusing on theareaof radicalinnovation, theroleof ProductLeadership is associatedwith creativitythrough research and development, being the most suitable profile for students who are eager to explore new paradigms and build marketable products from scratch (Craps et al., 2021).

Focusing on the area of process optimisation, the role of Operational Excellence is associated with the design and implementation of operational processes, being most suitable for students who thrive on locating opportunities for efficiency and effectiveness gains (Craps et al 2021).

Focusing on the area of tailored solutions, the role of Customer Intimacy is associated with developing solutions for complex businessenvironments,relying on both qualitativeand quantitativeaspects, being most suitableforstudentswithstrongcommunicationskillsthatarecapableofdevelopingdynamicsolutions(Craps et al 2021).

Based on the PREFER model, two tests were developed. The PREFER Explore test, which supports students to explorethedifferentrolesand their preferencefor each one of them, and afollow-up PREFER Matchtest, with specific guidelines for each area, which gives students feedback on their role alignment and essential competencies. In this study, the PREFER Explore test, a personal preference test, is used to identify the professional role preference of IEM students.

2.4 Research questions

The previously developed literature on engineers’ professional roles and the mission of the ESTIEM network helped us to formulate the following research questions:

RQ1: What are the preferred roles among IEM students in a European context?

RQ2: Is there a relation between the academic and/or professional context and the professional role preference?

3 Methodology

A mixed methods approach was chosen as it provides a better understanding of the topic investigated (Creswell, 2009). First, a quantitative online survey was conducted. The results were mapped against the academic and professional context. A follow up qualitative part with a few participants was organised to give voice on the topic and triangulate the results.

3.1 The sample

The study was conducted in six universities associated with the ESTIEM network: Lisbon (University of Lisbon) - Portugal; Porto (University of Porto) - Portugal; Saint-Petersburg (Saint-Petersburg State University of Economics) - Russia; Liège (University of Liège) - Belgium; İstanbul-Boğaziçi (Boğaziçi University) - Turkey; Eindhoven (Eindhoven University of Technology) - The Netherlands. The universities were selected based on their location, in a way that allowed us to have two from Southern Europe, two from Eastern Europe and two from Western Europe.

Withinthesesixuniversities,thespreadingofthesurveywaschannelledthroughthelocalassociationsinorder to motivate the Bachelor’s and Masters’ students’ community to participate in the study, regardless they did (not)belongtothelocalassociation.ThisresultedinthesamplesizedisplayedinTable1,distributedaccording to the responses obtained from each studied location.

Table 1. Distribution of Sample Size per university included in the Study.

Theparticipantsgavetheirconsentbeforetakingthesurvey.Thedatawerehandledanonymously.Considering data-related privacy issues, information such as age or gender of the respondents, level of study and previous professional experience were not mandatorily collected within the survey.

In the second stage of the research, one bachelor and one master’s student from each university were chosen randomly after taking the survey.

3.2 Data collection

Data was collected in three ways: (1) the data from an online test (PREFER Explore) provide insight in professionalrolepreference(RQ1),(2)thedatafromthepreviousESTIEMprojectsprovideinsightsinacademic andprofessionalcontext(RQ2),(3)whiletheinterviewsallowtotriangulatethedifferentsourcesofinformation and confirm the accuracy of our findings.

3.2.1 Online survey: professional role preference

The PREFER Explore test, a personal preference test, was used to provide an overall perspective of role preferenceallowingthecomparativeanalysis.Theonlinesurveywasdistributedthroughthelocalassociations’ social media in order to motivate the bachelor’s and masters’ students’ community to participate in the study, regardless of their membership to the local association.

Thetestincludesten questions,each with threeresponses. Participantsareaskedto rangetheresponses from most to least preferred. The online can be accessed through www.iiw.kuleuven.be/prefer and takes about 5 minutes.

3.2.2 ESTIEM projects: academic andprofessional context

In order to better understand and explain the results of the quantitative data collected through the survey, datacollectedfrom thepreviouslydescribedESTIEMprojectswereused(section2.2).Thedata collectedinthe Curricula Database project (academic context) are directly based on the publicly available course descriptions of the bachelor’s degree of each university. Based on that, the courses were classified in five categories and then the respective weight of each of those categories were provided in terms of percentages. The data collected in the Career Analysis project (professional context) are coming from a survey disseminated in the ESTIEM Alumni network. The number of respondents varied from one university to another between 5 to 25 participants. Based on the survey, the number of occurrences had been computed allowing us to put each career path in perspective of one another.

3.2.3 Semi-structured interview: triangulate results

In a final stage, interviews were conducted in a semi-structured way in order to triangulate the results and enhanceitscredibility.ParticipantswereshowntheresultsofthequantitativestudyandtheoutputsofESTIEM’s researchandwereaskedifitmadesenseinregardtotheirownexperiences.Furthermore,theywereaskedthe possible factors influencing the preferred role distributions, the effect their curricula had on the role’s distribution, etc. For example, some of the questions asked during the interview were:

- “Consideringthefivemainareas(sciences,engineering,IEM,management,others),whicharetheones, according to you, thatare morepresentin your curricula?”(showing theresultsof thepreferredroles) “Are the following results aligned with your expectations and the curricula you follow?”

- “According to your experience, what are the most preferred career paths of the students from your university?” (Showing the results of the Career Analysis Project) “Do you see a match between those results, the preferred roles and your experience?”

3.3 Data analysis

The output of the online PREFER Explore survey is presented under the format of a table divided into columns representing each one a situation and ranking the roles from most preferred to least preferred. Those data wereanalysed using MicrosoftExcel. Acomputation of the number of occurrences of eachrolehasbeen done for each observation following Pinxten et al. (2020). In order to get the final output, the previous results were summed and transformed into percentages to allow an easier analysis of the results.

4 Results

The main objective of the research is to explore the differences that may exist regarding the preferred roles between eachuniversity,whilealsodrawing somepreliminaryconclusionsaboutkeyfactorsbehindit,namely, the academic and professional context.

4.1 Professional role preference

The application of PREFER Explore to each university’s student community resulted in the distribution of preferred roles shown in Table 2, revealing a non-uniform classification for each location.

4.2 Academic and professional context

BasedontheresultspresentedinTable2,theabovementionedESTIEMresearch,thefollowingconclusionsper university were formulated as an answer to the two research questions previously defined. It is important to mention that those findings have been confirmed by the students when conducting the interviews.

University of Lisbon, Lisbon

Similar results were found for Product Leadership and Operational Excellence. Customer Intimacy seems to be the least preferred role. Aligned with the curricula, the students are taught a majority of engineering and industrial engineering and management related courses in their Bachelors’. Furthermore, those results are in line with the fact that most of the students tend to write their Master thesis in industrial-based consultancy and service companies.

University of Porto,

Porto

Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy are the two preferred roles with similar results. In fact, despite theverybigamountofScienceandEngineeringsubjectsintheirBachelors,theserolesareinlinewiththehigh importance given on customization and process optimization during their Masters. Besides, after finishing the degree the majority of the students aim to work in industry or in services.

Saint-Petersburg State University of Economics, Saint-Petersburg

Customer Intimacy and Product Leadership seem to be the two most preferred roles, leaving Operational Excellence on the side. This might be related to their curricula focussing a lot on management during the first twoyearsoftheirstudies.Besidesthegeneralcoursesmixingalotofmanagementandindustrialmanagement topics,studentshavethepossibilitytoapplythoseconceptsinreal-casescenariosthroughvariouscasestudies, company visits, and workshops organized by the university. Young graduates are expected to either enter consultancy firms, open a business or take on a position as project managers in the industry.

Boğaziçi University, İstanbul-Boğaziçi

ThereisaclearpreferencefortheProductLeadershiprolefollowedbytheCustomerIntimacy.TheOperational Excellence role seems to be by far the least preferred one. This can be explained by the structure of the bachelor’s degree. In fact, students have highly engineering focussed courses such as engineering graphics,

materials and processes in manufacturing, etc. or management courses such as economics, accounting, etc. The data regarding the level of studies were available for this university and most of the respondents were first-or second-yearBachelor students, showing thepotentialcorrelation between theamount of Engineering subjects and the tendency to prefer the Product Leadership role.

University of Liège, Liège

Forthesestudents,themostpreferredroleisCustomerIntimacyfollowedbyOperationalExcellenceandfinally Product Leadership. This can be explained by the fact that the students are studying in a management school, therefore, theirmainsubjectsarecourses suchasaccounting,marketing, economics, etc.Nonetheless, thereis a great focus on supply chain management and operations research and a low focus on engineering subjects. After they graduate, most students take on responsibility positions in consultancy companies or private small to medium enterprises.

Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven

There is a higher tendency towards the role of Operational Excellence and Product Leadership, leaving the Customer Intimacy role aside. During their Bachelors, students follow highly specific courses in the areas of industrial engineering and management as well as in the engineering area. The Eindhoven University of Technologyputsagreatemphasisonthedevelopmentofnewtechnologies,ontheresearchanddevelopment and on the operational excellence of all the processes. Therefore, most of their young graduates enter the labour market in the industry as product development team leader, operations specialist, etc.

Comparison across regions

The following table shows the distribution of preferred roles across regions, showing interesting patterns. Table

On a regional perspective (Southern-Europe), Lisbon and Porto are the most balanced ones in terms of role preferences. Another observation that can be made is the particularly low preference for the Operational Excellence role in Eastern Europe. No major conclusion can be drawn from the role distribution in Western Europe.

When analysing the overall distribution of the role preferences (Table 3), the difference between role preferences is small which can be interpreted as good because the industry needs to have the three types of engineers in order to operate efficiently. The needs of the industry change from one country to another, from one economic situation to another, from one crisis to another.

5 Discussion and Conclusion

Theapplication of thePREFER Exploreto the selected six universities spread across Europeseems to presenta significant diversity of preferred roles between students, motivating the discussion about the factors that influence the distinct local preferences (RQ1).

Complementing the observations directly drawn from the current study, other aspects such as the academic andprofessionalcontextsweredeemedasrelevantinordertounderstandtherankingofpreferredroles(RQ2). In fact, it seems that the impact of these dimensions can be identified as:

1. Academic Context: the IEM curricula of the university plays a key role in influencing the preferred roles towards the content of the subjects taught, in particular, in the locations that have a significant difference of percentage between the first preferred role and the second and third. This is in line with previous research which already underlined universities’ responsibility in influencing students’ career decisions (Lichtenstein et al, 2009).

2. Professional Context: the Alumni experiences reveal that the professional transition of the students of the selected universities are most likely to be influenced by the employment opportunities along the student’s path, such as business-based dissertations and internships in specific areas. With this observation,thestudieduniversities seemtoinfluencetheprofessionaltransitiontowardsthecontent of their curricula, reinforcing the preference related to roles suited for these areas.

Ona European perspective, thedistribution of preferred rolesvariesbetweenthestudied locations, showing a non-uniform distribution that can be influenced by university-based factors such as the curricula or employment opportunities. Therefore, it seems like there is no generic role preference within the European scenario, which highlights that it is important that a student takes time to select a university aligned with their personal career ambitions or, as an alternative, postpone the decision-making process to select their career ambitions influenced by the selected university’s characteristics and dominant roles. Furthermore, based on thoseresults,itisimportantforhighereducationtorealizethatalltherolesarerequiredonthelabourmarket. If a university is focussing on giving insights to their students on one particular role, it can have damaging effectsonthestudentsthemselves.Infact,theirpreferencescanchangefromwhattheywerewhentheystarted their study journey to when they start their career.

5.1 Limitations of the Study

Inthisexploratory study,werelied onthelocal associationforthedistributionofthesurvey.Consequently,we were bound to the local communication channels, which were mainly online due to the COVID-19 and encountered difficulties in estimating the reach of the survey inside each university. The findings should be interpreted within these boundaries.

Also, we noted a limited amount of personal information shared by the surveyed. This resulted in collected data that are mostly based on global aspects such as the university and degree of studies. Future research including personal data may benefit the overall analysis.

Furthermore, the interviews should be conducted on a bigger sample of participants as it is highly likely that the responses are influenced by one's personal experiences.

5.2 Further Research

Further research is recommended to take into account additional information related with personal characteristics (age and gender) and preferences, as well as professional experience (extracurricular and research). In fact, a new study aiming to gain a deeper understanding of the factors influencing the role preferencesmaybeconductedbyESTIEM.Withthisbroaderscope,thePREFERExploretestcanalsobeapplied to more universities in more countries, targeting according to specific criteria such as their curricula classification.

For a next step, providing the opportunity to apply the second test developed based on the PREFER model, in this case, the specific PREFER Match survey for the dominant preferred role, enabling a deeper analysis on the competency level, complementing this first research conducted on a global dimension.

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