Background: Engineering curricula are built around faculty and accreditors' perceptions of what knowledge, skills, and abilities graduates will need in engineering careers. However, the people making these decisions may not be fully aware of what industry employers require for engineering graduates.Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study is to determine how industry employer‐sought professional and technical skills vary among engineering disciplines and levels of education.Design/Method: Using a large sample (n = 26,103) of mined job advertisements, we use the O*NET skills database to determine the frequencies of different professional and technical skills for biomedical, civil, chemical, electrical, environmental, and mechanical engineers with bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees.Results: The most frequently sought professional skill is problem‐solving; the most frequently sought technical skills across disciplines are Microsoft Office software and computer‐aided design software. Although not the most frequently requested skills, job advertisements including the Python and MATLAB programming languages paid significantly higher salaries than those without.Conclusions: The findings of this study have important implications for engineering program leaders and curriculum designers choosing which skills to teach students so that they are best prepared to get and excel in engineering jobs. The results also show which skills students can prioritize investing their time in so that they receive the largest financial return on their investment.

Background: Despite the critical role of faculty diversity in the persistence and academic experiences of undergraduate students as well as in the development of engineering innovations, women of color (WoC) faculty are still underrepresented in engineering programs across the United States.Purpose/Hypothesis: This study identifies whether the demographic composition of undergraduate engineering students is correlated with the representation of WoC faculty. It also highlights the institutional‐ and departmental‐level factors that contribute to the race–gender diversification of the engineering professoriate.Design/Method: Informed by organizational demography as the theoretical framework, the methods include linear and logit regression analyses. Data come from the American Society for Engineering Education, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, and the American Community Survey, and include engineering departmental‐level observations across 345 institutions over 12 years.Results: Engineering departments that award more bachelor's degrees to women African American/Black undergraduate students are more likely to employ relatively more African American/Black women faculty. This positive relationship is also found among Asian Americans and Hispanics/Latinas.Conclusions: Research findings demonstrate the relationship between engineering undergraduate composition, as well as other departmental‐ and institutional‐level factors, and the prevalence of WoC faculty. The findings highlight important areas for stakeholders and academic administrators to consider when developing strategies and programs to diversify the composition of engineering faculty.

Engineers play an important role in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations, which aim to provide a more sustainable environment for future generations. Through design thinking, creativity, and innovation, sustainable engineering solutions can be developed. Future engineers need to acquire skills in their engineering curriculum to feel equipped to address sustainable design challenges in their career. This paper focuses on the impact of perceived design thinking traits and active learning strategies in design courses to increase senior engineering students’ motivation to engage in energy sustainability in their career. A national survey was distributed to senior engineering students in the United States (n = 4364). The survey asked students about their motivation to engage in sustainable design, their perceived design thinking traits (i.e., integrative feedback, collaboration), and if they experienced active learning strategies in design courses (i.e., learning by doing). The results highlight that higher perceived design thinking ability increases senior engineering students’ interests in designing solutions related to energy sustainability. Active learning experiences positively influence senior engineering students’ interests in designing solutions related to energy sustainability. These findings show the importance of teaching design thinking in engineering courses to empower future engineers to address sustainable challenges through design and innovation.

This work aims to answer one central question: to what extent can open-source generative text models be used in a workflow to approximate steps in thematic analysis in social science research? To answer this question, we present the Generative AI-enabled Theme Organization and Structuring (GATOS) workflow, which uses open-source machine learning techniques, natural language processing tools, and generative text models to facilitate aspects of thematic analysis. To establish evidence of validity of the method, we present three case studies applying the GATOS workflow, leveraging these models and techniques to inductively create codebooks similar to traditional procedures using thematic analysis. We show that the GATOS workflow can identify themes in the text that were used to generate the original synthetic datasets. We conclude with a discussion of relevant considerations, the implications of this work for social science research, and the tradeoffs of using open-source generative text models to facilitate scalable qualitative data analysis.

Background: This paper begins with the premise that ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) overlap in engineering. Yet, the topics of ethics and DEI often inhabit different scholarly spaces in engineering education, thus creating a divide between these topics in engineering education research, teaching, and practice.Purpose: We investigate the research question, “How are ethics and DEI explicitly connected in peer‐reviewed literature in engineering education and closely related fields?”Design: We used systematic review procedures to synthesize intersections between ethics and DEI in engineering education scholarly literature. We extracted literature from engineering and engineering education databases and used thematic analysis to identify ethics/DEI connections.Results: We identified three primary themes (each with three sub‐themes): (1) lenses that serve to connect ethics and DEI (social, justice‐oriented, professional), (2) roots that inform how ethics and DEI connect in engineering (individual demographics, disciplinary cultures, institutional cultures); and (3) engagement strategies for promoting ethics and DEI connections in engineering (affinity toward ethics/DEI content, understanding diverse stakeholders, working in diverse teams).Conclusions: There is a critical mass of engineering education scholars explicitly exploring connections between ethics and DEI in engineering. Based on this review, potential benefits of integrating ethics and DEI in engineering include cultivating a socially just world and shifting engineering culture to be more inclusive and equitable, thus accounting for the needs and values of students and faculty from diverse backgrounds.