Environmental Analysis of the Influences on Engineering Identity Formation in Technical Management Environments

The formation of a professional identity has become an area of both technical management research and practice. Current societal concerns on the issues of identity and identity formation have permeated all aspect of modern society, and the area of technical management is not immune to these concerns. The concerns are not simply a reflection of societal angst. The concerns raised by technical managers, and thus technical management researchers who explore and investigate the current issues plaguing the practice of management, are manifold but center around several issues. Identification with the profession has been generally found to be correlated to technical performance. This alone is of much value to working professionals that look to continuously improve their organizational performance. Other issues such as employee retention and quality of work-life also are affected by identification with an individual’s profession. This paper explores and evaluates the current state of the art in professional identity formation, specifically engineering identity formation in the workplace. As indicated in the open technical literature, a variety of approaches to measure professional identity maturity have been attempted. An identification and classification of these approaches, and a subsequent analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques, is provided in this study to better assist technical managers and technical management researchers in this developing field of study.