Career Paths Of Non Engineers Into Engineering Practice In The Midst Of Globalization: Implications For Engineering Education

Corporations, governments, and the employees they hire, face increasing challenges of the global economy such as mobility of capital and labor, organizational re-structuring across national boundaries, development and implementation of more efficient production and manufacturing practices. Yet we know very little about how engineers understand and experience globalization, and how globalization impacts their education, practices, and collaborations with non-engineers. For example, organizational changes and initiatives implemented to respond to global competition, such as mergers, joint ventures, product customization, subcontracting, etc, create circumstances for non-engineers to be hired as engineers as actually practice engineering. Under these circumstances, non-engineers’ knowledges and skills become important for the solution of technical problems. Collected through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the data presented here show how processes of globalization open engineering practice to the application of nonengineering knowledge by non-engineers to complex technical problems. The analysis of this data has a number of implications for engineering education for it shows to non-engineers alternative career paths into engineering, reveals the value of non-engineering knowledge and skills in the solution of technical problems, and sheds light into the limitations of the educational engineering pipeline as a metaphor of engineering education.