Industry Practices For Providing Engineers With Team Skills

The environment that engineers encounter upon graduation has changed dramatically in recent years, with technical skills being necessary but no longer sufficient for today’s conditions. Industry practitioners, followed closely by deans of engineering schools and by ABET, have identified nontechnical skills that are of paramount importance for engineering graduates. Chief among these is the ability to work in interdisciplinary teams. Given the historical lack of emphasis that engineering schools have placed on creating and improving team skills in students, it is natural that industry practitioners have created their own practices aimed at creating and improving those skills. In this paper, we report some of the practices identified in interviews with industry practitioners, and discuss the feasibility of transferring and implications for utilizing such practices in academic settings. Interviews & Interviewees Practitioners with extensive experience supervising engineers working in teams were identified through our Industrial Advisory Board members, through faculty members, through conference contacts, and through contacting targeted organizations and asking for a person with such experience. By this method, we were able to interview practitioners in manufacturing, service, transportation and government organizations. Interviewees hailed from relatively small manufacturing organizations (approximately $6 million in annual sales), to some of the largest and well known (UPS, FEDEX), and most respected engineering companies (e.g., Bechtel, Intel, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Hewlett Packard) in the world. As a group, our interviewees averaged 17.9 years supervising engineers working in teams and participated in an average of 68 teams each. They served as leaders or supervisors for 22% of the those teams, and served as non-supervisory team members on the remaining 78%. Interviews were conducted either at the interviewees’ place of work, or at California State University, Hayward, at the preference of the interviewees. Interviews utilized a semi-structured format, and ranged in duration from 50 minutes to 2 hours. Interviews were video taped and viewed by multiple research team members to extract relevant information. P ge 10761.1 Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education During the interviews, we asked our interviewees a series of questions related to the training and practices they have had exposure to that were aimed at creating and improving team skills. Questions included identification of the training/practice and who provided the training and in what format. Additionally, we asked if the training was team or individual based, whether the training was in response to substandard performance, and if skills were acquired or improved because of the training. Interviewees were asked to identify training that they had participated in as well as training that they assigned or provided to their supervisees. Results We categorized responses into two categories, ‘methods and practices’ which is how training or practices were delivered or executed, and ‘content’ which refers to what topics or issues were covered (e.g., use of training videos would be a method, and what is covered on the video would be the content). Table 1a lists the content or focus of activities aimed at improving team skills of engineers identified by our interviewees. Table 1b lists the training methods and other practices that our interviewees had experience with. Table 1a. Content of training aimed at creating or improving team skills of engineers.