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Engineering employers are discovering that their workforce requires certain skills which seem to be in short supply. Rapid technological change, participative management and employee empowerment, global competition, and other workplace innovations have created a demand for a higher skill level for engineering graduates. Identifying industry expectations for engineering graduates are an important step in developing university curricula which are responsive to the needs of the profession. The present study identifies specific industry expectations for new engineering graduates and provides practical recommendations for strategically aligning engineering curricula with the professional community. By identifying specific skills requisite for career success, universities can provide an improved service for their graduates and the engineering industry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between management education, the performance of German engineering enterprises and the strategic knowledge status of the executives running those enterprises.

The paper is based upon the results of an online/posted self‐administered questionnaire conducted within Germany, augmented by micro case studies.

Findings suggest that the curricula in German Engineering Faculties fail to fully embrace business and management studies, in particular strategic management which has virtually no presence. Engineers dominate senior management positions within the German machinery and equipment sector yet they display limited knowledge of strategic management tools. There is also evidence that links performance with the application of management knowledge.

The study is limited to senior executives within German SMEs from the machinery and equipment sector. It is likely that the findings would be applicable throughout the German engineering industry; however, generalisability to other countries may be limited. Only a single year's performance (2007) was considered and this is also a limitation of the study. This was mitigated by a request that anomalies be noted, such as extraordinary write offs or a windfall profit, within the year in question, this was then taken into account during the analysis.

Based on the findings it is suggested that German faculties of engineering should enhance and expand management education, particularly strategic management, thus enhancing future performance potential within German SMEs.

This paper examines the level of management education attained by senior engineering executives with a key economic industrial sector in Germany, as such it is one of few such studies which investigates the link between management education and performance.

FOR some time past there has been in current use in the United States, the term “Industrial Engineering”; a term which in England is used but seldom, and with many varying interpretations.

In this discussion, we sketch the motivation and design for a co-terminal master's degree in Entrepreneurial Science and Technology. We aim the degree specifically at science and engineering undergraduates who would go on to (1) individual or technology management positions in established organizations, (2) entrepreneurship in the public, private, or nonprofit sectors, or (3) graduate work in engineering or science or professional degrees, including business, medicine, law, or policy. The goal would be to give students concise but complete skill-sets in entrepreneurship and teamwork, and effective career networks across diverse professions. It is our hope that this can be done within an intense one-year curriculum, such that students would remain technically current (and possibly develop the application of their technical research during the degree). We discuss alternate and existing models for entrepreneurship education and explain how our conception differs.

A SHORT DEFINITION of undergraduate project work might be ‘work of a special nature outside the normal curriculum of an undergraduate course’. This sort of definition covers all tasks of a special nature at any stage or in any part of a course. It is perfectly legitimate to consider work so defined in the first year of a course, the final year, and so on as project work, but the trouble with a wide definition, is that it can be too wide, so that special work in Liberal Studies and other subjects might be thought to be included. The intention here is to consider only projects of an engineering nature.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the best practices of industrial engineering (IE) programs that could be learnt and used at other educational institutions.

Nine IE programs in the USA are benchmarked using a conceptual framework that considers an educational program as a system consisting of a purpose, a curriculum, resources, and quality processes. The information used in benchmarking is collected from the program self-study reports, course catalogs, and websites which are available on the internet.

It is found that in spite of their diversity in history, missions, sizes, and reputations, the studied programs are rather unified in terms of purpose definition, curriculum formation, resource selection, and quality process usage. From the analysis, a template of IE curriculum is proposed.

As the selection of the studied programs is based on the availability of the information, the findings may not be representative for IE programs in the USA. Future work can aim at comparing IE programs from various countries.

The findings could be used as benchmarks by IE schools interested in the improvement of operations.

A conceptual framework for benchmarking is proposed and proves useful for comparing educational programs. The findings represent the current best practices at IE schools in the USA.

The purpose of this study was to examine the learning experiences of high school Black males participating in an academy of engineering that was configured as a magnet school. We followed a qualitative case study design to explore the experiences of 16 Black male academies of engineering students. We identified three recurring themes from the interviews with the Black male academy of engineering students: Promoting Interests in STEM, Drawing Connections to Core Academic Concepts, and An Affinity for Hands-on Learning through the Engineering Curriculum. The results of our study helped us to better understand how academies provide a platform for Black male students' interest in engineering as a viable college and career pathway.

This paper aims to analyze the presence of sustainability in 16 Spanish higher education curricula in the fields of education and engineering.

The methodology uses two instruments: sustainability map and sustainability presence map. These instruments enable analysis of the number of subjects that develop sustainability and the sustainability presence level in each curriculum; identification of what domain levels of the learning taxonomy sustainability is most developed; and analysis of whether a correlation exists between the sustainability presence and the number of subjects that develop sustainability in each curriculum.

A wide variety of subjects develop sustainability in a given degree, depending on the university. The presence of sustainability is more homogeneous in education degrees than in engineering degrees. Education degrees have a greater presence of sustainability in the lower domain levels of taxonomy, while in engineering degrees the lower levels of taxonomy have a lower presence of sustainability than the higher levels. Finally, a correlation appears to exist between the number of subjects that develop sustainability in the curriculum and the sustainability presence. However, engineering degrees seem to need fewer subjects than education degrees to achieve the same degree of sustainability presence.

This paper proposes a methodology to measure sustainability presence that can be applicable to the curricula of a higher education degree if the corresponding sustainability map is available. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the largest study yet conducted to analyze the presence of sustainability in different higher education curricula.

When implemented effectively and systematically across a curriculum, high impact practices (HIP) have the potential to increase student engagement and result in higher student achievement. The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) is a four-year military university with a large liberal education core curriculum that provides the foundation for service and officership in the United States Air or Space Forces. Building on the liberal education core, the civil engineering (CE) major’s courses begin with the cornerstone field engineering course, paired with a two-week co-curricular experience for students at an Air or Space Force installation. With its motto “construct first, design later,” the field engineering course is an HIP and quintessential experiential learning course that gives students a practical frame-of-reference for future analysis and design courses. The CE major culminates with another HIP, the capstone design course, which gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, building confidence in their ability to successfully apply those skills to the increasingly complex problems they will face after graduation. This book chapter provides a case study of the CE major at the USAFA, documenting the HIPs across the majors’ program, and highlighting the key elements and benefits of each.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a trending educational concept in engineering education. The literature suggests that there is a growing variety in CBL implementations, stemming from the flexible and abstract definition of CBL that is shaped by teachers' perceptions. The chapter discusses how the CBL concept has been developed at Eindhoven University of Technology and describes the development and use of two educational resources aimed to facilitate conceptualization, design, and research of CBL for curriculum designers and teachers. The first resource is a set of CBL design principles for framing the variety of CBL and providing teachers with advice about how to develop CBL courses within an overall CBL curriculum. The second resource is a curriculum-mapping instrument called the CBL compass, which aims at mapping CBL initiatives and identifying gaps, overlaps, and misalignments in CBL implementation at a curriculum level. Both CBL design principles and the CBL compass have been developed by combining insights from theory and practical examples of CBL at TU/e into a higher order model of vision, teaching and learning, and support. We discuss the two educational instruments and showcase their application in the Eindhoven Engineering Education (E³) program, and we discuss preliminary findings and insights. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future practice and research.