The Business Case for Engineering Skills-based Volunteerism in K-12 Education

Skills-based volunteerism programs can provide technical employees effective and meaningful opportunities to utilize, develop, and transfer their skills while contributing to their companies’ community engagement objectives in K-12 education. While many companies encourage their employees to engage in education-related volunteerism, these efforts are often one-off events related to student outreach or recruiting, rather than opportunities for employees to utilize their skills to not only give back to community, but also develop professionally and personally. This study focuses on assessing the impact of a pilot skills-based volunteerism program on the skills and mindsets of professional engineers, who translate their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills in open-ended engineering design challenges that they subsequently teach to elementary students and their families in underserved, community-based out-of-school programs. This study suggests that community partners, engineers, and the sponsoring company each benefit from this skills-based volunteerism program: community partners directly gain access to working engineers and high-quality, real-world STEM content; engineers develop their communication, creativity, and leadership and mentoring skills, while also broadening their cultural awareness of and engagement with underserved communities; and sponsoring companies indirectly benefit from their engineers’ increased skills, networks, and engagement.