From Engineering School to Careers: An Examination of Occupational Intentions of Mechanical Engineering Students

Abstract This paper examines the variation in career plans among U.S. senior year mechanical engineering undergraduates. The extent to which candidates persist from engineering school into engineering careers attracts attention from hiring managers, educators, and policymakers concerned with the future of the engineering workforce. Prior research has identified patterns of systemic variation in engineering students’ persistence, finding that particular student subsets exhibit lower likelihoods of pursuing conventionally categorized engineering jobs after graduation compared to others. These groups have included students from underrepresented demographics and those with particular key skills profiles. Based on survey data from a sample of 1,061 mechanical engineering seniors across nine universities, we first constructed an occupational sorting model that replicates previously reported relationships between student-specific factors and students’ intentions to work in engineering. We then expanded this model into a new multinomial outcomes model that examines the unique sets of factors associated with specific categories of occupational intentions from an array of engineering and non-engineering options. We find factors such as internship experiences, risk aversion, mathematics enjoyment, strength of professional identity, leadership aspirations, perceptions of creative opportunities, and salary expectations to be significantly associated, in unique combinations, with various types of occupational intentions. We conclude by discussing how knowledge of factors salient to students’ occupational sorting tendencies can help engineering managers refine approaches for recruitment and job formulation, so as to potentially broaden the attractiveness of engineering jobs across the candidate pool and to improve candidate-job matching.