Contributions: The study contributes to the social cognitive career theory (SCCT) by explaining high-school students’ career choices and finding possible relations between self-efficacy, interpersonal skills, what inspires them to choose a career, and their actual choices. The practical contribution of this research lies in understanding the impact of the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) program on its participants and graduates. Background: The FIRST program incorporates project-based learning that fosters the design and production of innovative robotics by teams of students who compete annually. Research Questions: 1) Do the FIRST program activities increase STEM exposure and encourage STEM career choices, and if so, how? 2) What are the factors that affect these choices? Are there correlations between those factors? If so, what are they? 3) Is the effect of the FIRST program on FIRST high-school students’ exposure and career choices different from that effect on FIRST graduates? If so, what are the differences and does gender play a role in these differences? Methodology: The research participants included 119 FIRST high-school students and 297 FIRST graduates. The research applied a convergent parallel mixed-methods approach, with data collected both qualitatively via interviews and quantitatively via questionnaires. Findings: Analysis of the data showed that the FIRST program increased participants’ STEM exposure and career choice in STEM domains. A significant, positive, strong correlation was found between interpersonal skills, STEM exposure, career choice, family and school support, and external motivation.

The program For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) for young students incorporates project-based learning (PBL) with designing and building wireless-controlled robots. The students are guided by experts, mostly engineers. The FIRST organization determines the theme of the robot annual competition. The goal of this research is to characterize and evaluate the effect of the FIRST program on graduates’ self-efficacy, interpersonal skills, and career choices in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The research participants included 297 FIRST graduates, mostly high schoolers, who responded to questionnaires, and five of them were interviewed. Analysis of the data showed that the FIRST program improved graduates’ interpersonal skills such as time management, teamwork skills, and self-efficacy, as well as had an impact on the graduates’ STEM career choices. The main factors impacting the graduates’ career choice was their exposure to robotics and to experts from the industry. The theoretical contribution is to the social cognitive theory (SCT) in the context of the FIRST program. Our study explains students’ career choice through correlations among students’ aspirations for choosing a career, their self-efficacy, their interpersonal skills, and their actual choice. The practical contribution lies in better understanding the robotic PBL program and expanding the STEM work force.

The underrepresentation of women in engineering is a significant concern. This study applies the social cognitive theory and the social career cognitive theory (SCCT) to investigate gender differences in engineering career choices. We examined reasons given by 19 systems engineers and 330 undergraduate engineering students for choosing engineering and categorizing them according to SCCT themes. We compared the distribution of reasons across themes and categories by career stage and gender. For engineers, the category self-efficacy correlated significantly with challenges and opportunities and current job suitability categories, and women engineers cited challenges mainly with work-life balance and the gender glass ceiling. Undergraduate students cited personal reasons more frequently than environmental ones, with behavioral reasons being the least common. The extended SCCT model includes the categories challenges and opportunities and current job suitability within the behavioral theme, with the latter pertaining specifically to career retention. This research the set of provides insights into gender-dependent engineering career choice and retention by expanding the set of SCCT categories.

Moving systems engineering's center of gravity from text documents to digital models, model‐based system engineering (MBSE) facilitates collaboration, reduces errors, and improves system understanding, but systems engineers often face challenges when they start working with MBSE, as they need to consider and model textual requirements as a basis for the system architecture. Synchronizing requirements with the system model can address critical questions, such as which requirements are assigned and covered in the system model, what effort is required to meet these requirements, how to manage changes to requirements, and how to effectively trace them in the system. Object Process Methodology (OPM, ISO 19450) is an MBSE language and methodology for modeling systems, which encapsulates function, structure, and behavior within a single model. The research goal is to expand the MBSE methodology by modeling requirements that are linked to system model artifacts. The objective is minimizing misunderstandings between stakeholders’ text‐based requirements and the engineered model while improving the ability to track changes in requirements and artifacts. An OPM‐based model, OPM‐R, which unifies system requirements and architecture, was developed and evaluated through (1) interviews with seven experts who compared the current text‐based approach and the proposed one based on the requirements of three test system models and (2) a researcher diary. Findings indicate that OPM‐R is preferred over the text‐based approach, as it reduces misunderstandings and gaps in requirements, enhancing the ability to trace coverage of system artifacts and track changes in requirements.