Campus to career, understanding how engineering student skill perceptions link to future career pathways

The National Academy of Engineering's Engineer of 2020 (E2020) report identifies skills and attributes that engineering undergraduates will need to possess to find success in the engineering workforce. Our study seeks to extend prior research that developed typologies of engineering seniors based on a set of E2020 outcomes to investigate variation in career pathways across outcomes-based groupings of students. Student clusters range from those who self-report highest on each outcome and are the most well rounded (i.e., those who most closely resemble "the Engineers of 2020") to clusters characterized by 50% of the reported abilities of students in the E2020 cluster on different outcomes. In this paper, we examine how six clusters of mechanical engineering students perceive their future career pathways, evaluating the likelihood of students in each outcomes-based grouping to enter an engineering or non-engineering related career path. Findings shed insight on how students' perceived relative competencies on a variety of skills related to their career decision-making and/or views of possible careers. This work serves as preliminary analysis that we will extend across multiple engineering disciplines in our next steps.