Using science to support and develop employees in the tech workforce - an opportunity for multi-disciplinary pursuits in engineering education

The majority of students who choose to major in engineering do so to become a part of the community of practice of professional engineers (Johri & Olds, 2011), meaning that they want to have adequate exposure to what a career as a professional engineer could potentially be as part of their college experience. However, according to Jonassen (2014), engineering graduates are not well trained to contribute to the workplace due to the complexities associated with engineering work. Stevens, Johri, and O'Connor (2014) described engineering work as that which involves complexity, ambiguity, and contradictions. Since developing the skills for innovation involves analysis of complex, ambiguous, ill-defined, real-world problems (Daly, Mosyjowski, & Seifert, 2014; Newell, 2010), students must have an opportunity to, at the very least, be exposed to multidisciplinary teams. This emphasis on the need for exposure to multi-disciplinary problem solving holds true not only for undergraduate engineers in training, but also for graduate students focused on engineering education.

This paper draws from experiences of a multi-disciplinary research team studying researching talent management in the tech industry, including an engineering education research scientist, Industrial Organization (IO) psychologist, economists, and program and product managers to present lessons from leading with science to understand, inform, and better employee experiences at a large private technology company. Through examples of two types of analyses that the multi-disciplinary team has taken on (i.e., conducting experiments and content validation research), we exemplify how projects in industry leverage multi-disciplinary expertise. Finally, we provide recommendations for educators teaching engineers as well as training engineering educators to help understand how multi-disciplinary teams come together in the engineering workforce.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: we want to highlight some typical roles within multidisciplinary teams in the tech workforce, by highlighting composition of one such team working on talent management, and also provide recommendations for undergraduate learners in STEM to understand how teams leverage a multitude of expertise in diverse domains to provide the best solutions.