Group essay Interdisciplinary and engineering education

Introduction In this section of the essay we will be analysing education of engineers and how that corresponds to skills and learning needed in the workplace, as well as the interdisciplinary nature of said workplace. For the education of engineers we will be focusing on degree level learning only as this is naturally the most targeted learning undertaken in an engineers schooling career. We disregard A-levels and bellow as the subjects are typically shared between differing university courses, for example at Southampton University to undertake an engineering course starting in September 2012 Alevel maths and physics were required, but these subjects were also necessary to study any of the physics degrees. However because there are a number of core skills that translate from mechanical engineering through to all the other engineering disciplines as well as numerous other degrees, we feel it is important to also look at how engineers cooperate with each other in addition to other professionals, in order to properly investigate the complexities and context of being a 21st century engineer.

Survey In order to help us a achieve a greater understanding of these areas, we decided to carry out a survey. This was sent to numerous members the engineering faculty at Southampton University, along with engineering alumni from the university. The survey consisted of two sections each targeting one of the above areas. The segment in relation to education asked the participants to rate the relevance of their degree to their current occupation, both in the sense of how useful the skills still are, and the correspondence between degree taken and current employment. It also asked about the amount of additional learning required upon the completion of their university degree before they were fully integrated into the workplace.

Predications Before the survey was sent out, we sat down and wrote a list of the answers we expected to receive. This was done so that we could compare our views at the time to the reality reflected in the survey. These were as follows: Education

1. Is the degree you were awarded with the same as the one you applied to take when joining the university? This was a simple yes/no question, and we expected that the vast majority would say yes.

2. Is the your degree still relevant, i.e. are you still relying predominantly on the skills and information learned at university to complete your work or are you having to continue to learn new things? We predicted that a high proportion would say that their degree still carried significant relevance to their current occupation. However we expected that an amount of additional learning would have been required before starting work properly, explaining why the degree was not 100% relevant as no degree is target toward a specific job. Furthermore, whilst studying for a degree a student is exposed to a variety of specialisations and skills that would only be applied in specific work areas, and as such not all of them would have relevance to their place of work.

3. How much additional learning did you have to take before starting work properly? Due to the prediction made for the pervious question, we decided to write a follow-up question asking about the amount of additional learning to further our understanding of the training of engineers and the interim period between degree and full time work. We assumed an amount would be needed regardless of level of qualification simply to adjust for the new environment. However we also thought that a proportion of this time would be spent learning more about the specific requirements of the role the engineer would be moving into. We believed that the majority of responses would say that a reasonable amount of additional learning was required but not a huge amount. We also reasoned that for any engineer going into a field not directly linked to their degree would naturally require more additional learning.

4. Does your current job correspond to the degree you took, i.e. you studied mechanical engineering and now work as a mechanical engineer or on a mechanical based project. Again another follow-up question was needed light of the previous prediction to find out what proportion of those surveyed were in a role that directly linked to their degree. This also follows on from question 1, as this

would find indicate what proportion of those surveyed had clear idea of what kind of job they wanted to go into. We believed that the majority would be in occupations that still related to their degree.

Work The first three questions of this section dealt with what kind of work those surveyed were currently in, wanted to get involved with and what they originally wanted to do when starting at university. 1. How often do you currently work with engineers of different disciplines? We assumed that there would be a reasonable level of cooperation and collaborative work between engineers of different disciplines and believed the survey answers would reflect this.

2. How often do you currently work with professionals whose backgrounds are not in engineering? We reasoned that there would be an amount of work involving non engineers but this would be more on a consultancy level than day to day work and as such would be less than the amount of contact between engineers of different disciplines.

3. How often would you say that you currently work with groups or individuals from abroad, for instance research groups based outside of the UK or foreign contractors? This question was asked to find out about the amount of international cooperation between engineering groups. We believed that there would be an amount of work done with internationals but this would be on a consultancy level again as opposed to direct work in the majority of cases.

The response The responses were as follows: (Pie charts from excel)

Analysis Education

1. Prediction was, no surprises 2. More people responded saying that their degree came in useful all the time than we expected. This possibly reflects the quality of education and learning at universities as they have managed to keep their teachings forward thinking enough to still be significant sometime after the graduation. Equally no responses said that their degree no longer carried any relevance to their occupations. Again this also reflects on the general skills taught at university in addition to the course specific skills that will always have a use in almost any walk of life. 3. The responses to this question did not follow our prediction as closely as we had anticipated. The responders had to undertake a significant amount of additional training before commencing work properly. Perhaps this suggests that the level of education is not up to the standards required by the industry however we believe that this is not the case. Rather industry is more specialised than the education system can account for and as such role-specific training is a necessity. On the other hand a significant proportion of those surveyed said that they required no additional learning. This may be because of factors that the survey does take account of, such as unemployment, gap years, or even training through a year in industry scheme. 4. The responses followed our prediction reasonably closely, however as this was a follow-up to question 3, which we have found to be a flawed question, difficult to draw a meaningful conclusion from the responses in relation to additional learning and current role. Never the less as this question also has links to the first question, we can draw the conclusion that the majority of those surveyed came to university with a reasonable idea of what kind of employment they wanted to go into. However this still left a significant proportion that have gone into jobs with either no or some correspondence to their degree. This would indicate the flexibility and versatility of the modern engineer, having skills that have wide range of applications.

Work 1. The survey responses to this question should a higher level of cooperation and collaboration than we anticipated. This highlights the specialised nature of the profession in the 21st century with a wide variety of specialisations working on the same project. 2. The results yet again were surprising with some of the time being the bottom end of our range rather than the top as was expected. This illustrates that engineers are well integrated into the

professional world as opposed to the common perception that engineers only regularly work with others from within the engineering world. 3. This question was somewhat superfluous to the topic being addressed in this section however still provides a useful insight into the working lives of engineers. The responses show that engineering has become a subject in which international cooperation is now the norm rather than the exception. Therefore learning to a part of the international engineering community is something all prospective engineers must do.

General conclusion Overall, our perspective of modern day engineering has changed significantly upon viewing the results of the survey. We have come to realise that studying to become a professional engineer provides a set of key skills that can be applied in a wide range of occupations, both within and outside of the engineering industry. Cooperation and teamwork have also been highlighted as important traits for an engineer to possess. This cooperation exists on an international, interdisciplinary and cross industry level. We believe that in order to further analyse these levels of cooperation, we would require an additional survey to investigate the exact professions which have the most frequent contact with engineers, what the main focus of the projects are and the exact role of each party involved.

Survey Analysis While we have learnt a great deal from this survey, we have also come to understand that it was a somewhat limited questionnaire, missing key areas that would have helped to develop our conclusions further. For example, specific time frames of additional training would have helped to clarify precisely how far that the level of education falls below industry requirements. Having said that, more questions that link together better would have rectified this shortcoming in a way which could have led to more in depth conclusions.