Understanding the Socializer Influence on Engineering Students’ Career Planning

This research paper describes how engineering juniors and seniors perceive the influence of socializers on their post-graduation career planning. Grounded in Expectancy x Value Theory (EVT), this qualitative investigation is part of a sequential mixed-methods study that included two survey phases and an interview phase. An exploratory analysis of 72 interview excerpts revealed four dominant socializer groups, namely, family, peers, university related individuals, and work related individuals, as well as three distinct areas of socializer influence: thinking about specific jobs, job exploration in general, and choosing whether to pursue further education. A closer look showed that while parents, peers, professors, and supervisors were all important to students’ career plans, the type of influence each had tended to differ. In-depth examples of socializer influence and their impact on students’ job related decisions are shared in this paper. The results are insightful for researchers, university and industry stakeholders, and students. Introduction To support and strengthen a healthy engineering workforce, researchers have worked towards gaining a holistic understanding of the factors influencing the entry and exit of engineers from engineering majors and fields. In examining career choice processes both in general and in specific disciplines, research has tended to focus on how the attributes and characteristics of individuals differentiate their choices. Outcomes from this research show that multiple factors such as socializers, knowledge, skills, and abilities influence students’ transition in to the workforce. Lacking from current literature is a nuanced understanding of how these factors impact career choices. To begin closing this gap, our analysis takes an in-depth look at the junior and senior engineering students and the socializers that influence their career planning. We define a socializer as anyone who provides a student with information about their career options and, as a result, influences the student’s thinking about their post-graduation plans. Specifically, this research paper addresses the following questions: RQ1. Whom do junior and senior engineering students perceive as socializers influencing their post-graduation career plans? RQ2. What areas of thinking related to junior and senior engineering students’ career plans are influenced by socializers? RQ3. What areas of thinking related to junior and senior engineering students’ career plans are influenced by specific socializers? To answer these questions, we examined interviews with 62 engineering juniors and seniors from six different universities in the U.S. To frame our study, we used Eccles et al.'s Expectancy x Value Theory of Achievement Motivation as this framework provides concrete examples of ways that socializers influence student outcomes. Background Literature and Theoretical Frameworks Although research shows that socializers influence all aspects of pathways into and through engineering careers, literature on the role of socializers in students’ choices about their first positions after they graduate is fragmented. For example, previous work shows that positive undergraduate research experiences lead engineering students toward graduate school and that positive internship experiences lead them toward the workforce after graduation from college. Previous work also shows that interactions with professors and graduate students form a major part of the undergraduate research experience, and that interactions with supervisors, coworkers, and mentors are a significant portion of students’ social interactions during internships. Parents influence undergraduate engineering students’ career and persistence choices as well. For example, Martin, Simmons and Yu (2014) identified six different roles that parents fill and identified patterns based on parental educational attainment level. Building on the idea of parent support, Simmons and Martin (2014) found that a variety of people can serve as what they call fictive kin, or “like family,” to support first-generation college students’ persistence in engineering. Family (i.e., family of origin and current partner/spouse) has also been determined to impact the choices of early career engineering graduates. While such findings help researchers and practitioners understand the strong forces pushing students toward and away from pursuing (and persisting in) engineering careers, we do not know the full list of who all these socializers are nor do we know details of what those influences are. Using a large data set, our analysis helps by expanding current knowledge of “who’s” and “what’s”. Our analysis is situated within a larger, mixed-methods and longitudinal study which seeks to understand connections between socializers and specific actions of engineering undergraduate students as they navigate toward their first position after graduation. This study uses the Professional Pathways model which combines two frameworks, Sampson et al.'s model of Cognitive Information Processing and Eccles et al.'s Expectancy x Value Theory of Achievement Motivation (EVT), to comprehensively examine career choice processes. Specific to our research questions, we used Eccles’ EVT as a framework. EVT posits that socializers’ beliefs influence their behaviors, which in turn influence students’ outcomes. The beliefs, behaviors, and outcomes considered for our study are those relevant to students’ career choice processes. For example, socializer beliefs include general perceptions such as those regarding the work environments associated with a specific career or student-specific perceptions related to students’ abilities, skills, and interests. Socializer behaviors are how the socializers act or what the socializers do and may include offering career guidance or encouragement of career related activities. Finally, student outcomes include the choices students make, but also changes in students’ self-concepts of ability, perceived costs of obtaining a career, interest in a specific career, etc. Although EVT theorizes such relationships, little research to date has actually explored these relationships in terms of how different socializers may impact aspects of a student’s career choice process or outcomes. In conjunction with EVT, qualitative research is particularly useful to unpack the nuances of who different socializers are and what part of the process they influence from the student’s perspective. Research Methods To address our research questions, we examined the interview responses of sixty-two juniors and seniors from six engineering schools across the country. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to allow students to provide insight into their personal experiences, in their own words. These interviews probed students’ beliefs and perceptions pertaining to their preparedness to approach, enter, and traverse the job market. Specifically, questions asked about factors influencing their confidence and knowledge related to job exploration, job acquisition, and job performance. Two sets of categories emerged from coding the data to answer our research questions RQ1 and RQ2: the socializers whom students reported as having influenced their post-graduation career planning and the types of influence socializers had on their plans. We also examined the relationships between these sets of categories to identify the underlying patterns of influence of specific socializer groups on particular areas of career related panning (RQ3). Research Sites/Participants The study deployed nationally included a Western private university (WPRI), a Western public university (WPUB), a Midwestern private university (MPRI), a Midwestern public university (MPUB), and two Eastern public universities, one of which is a residential school (ERES), and the other a commuter school (ECOM). The school sampling was purposeful for their geographic, institutional, and student body diversity, to allow for the examination of both personal and contextual (e.g., regional, institutional, disciplinary, etc.) factors that affect engineering students’ career choices. The six universities have purposeful variation with respect to Carnegie classification for size, engineering enrollment, and public/private classifications. The participants were a subset of 1,916 engineering students surveyed for the larger, longitudinal, mixed-method study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and titled Professional Engineering Pathways Study (PEPS). Among the 1,916 students, 939 agreed to participate in a follow-up interview, and 76 were invited to be interviewed resulting in a total of 62 interviews. The interview sampling included purposeful sampling of mechanical engineers across all universities, and chemical engineers from two universities, to reduce potential variation in the data due to differences in discipline. Our initial interview plan was to represent the student demographics within each department; however, several universities did not have a sufficient sampling pool or did not have sufficient student response to match said demographics. Table 1 includes participant’s self-reported demographics from the initial survey. Table 1. Interview Participant Demographics School Gender [1] Year [2] Major [3] Ethnicity [4] Total M F O JR SR ME CHE Non-URM URM ECOM 5 5 0 4 6 7 3 6 4 10 ERES 10 4 0 6 8 12 2 13 1 14 MPRI 6 0 0 1 5 6 0 6 0 6 MPUB 6 5 0 3 8 11 0 9 2 11 WPRI 4 7 1 6 6 12 0 10 2 12 WPUB 7 2 0 2 7 9 0 7 2 9 TOTAL 38 23 1 22 40 57 5 51 11 62 [1] M=Male, F=Female, O=Other; [2] JR=Junior, SR=Senior; [3] ME=Mechanical Engineering, CHEM E=Chemical Engineering; [4] URM=Underrepresented racial/ethnic minority, based on student survey response – students selecting at least one of the following in a “mark all that apply” question about their racial or ethnic identity were classified as URM: American Indian or Alaska Native, Black or African American, Hispa