SISA2 - From doctoral student to practising professional - bridging the gap through a discovery based workshop approach

Day 1 at 17:30
EngD students are doctoral students whose career path is expected to lead to technical leadership roles in industry. Central to their training programme at Manchester is Professional Practice - what it means to be a professional engineer. Previous experiences of delivering such content on Professional Practice, typically as a “shopping list” of attributes and competences to aspire to, had fallen short of expectations. Feedback was poor, students found it hard to engage with the notion of professional engineering competences and what they might mean in real working practice. This contrasted with their deep understanding of the technical skills and specialist knowledge they were obtaining through their doctoral research.

We will describe a radical rethink of engaging our students with this topic, and its successful application in a completely re-designed workshop. It encourages students to explore the world of the professional engineer through interviews, case studies, role models, and by importing tools used in industrial leadership development and strategic facilitation. Ultimately students formulate their own statements of professional engineering competence. We believe this approach could be equally relevant in other, non-engineering, professional sectors.