Leadership for engineers: A course for developing professional and business skills for engineers

Abstract

Employers consistently cite leadership and professional skills as some of the most desirable abilities for engineering graduates. Unfortunately, it is rare to have these skills explicitly taught to engineers in the classroom, so graduates are left to develop these skills on their own. Moreover, knowledge of fundamental business functions is increasingly important for civil engineers. To address these needs, the authors developed a course, Leadership for Engineers, and used an interactive and highly engaging business simulation, ScrimmageSimTM, to create an active learning environment where students are placed in leadership positions and are required to develop basic business operating plans; execute these plans in the simulation; and reflect on their team's successes, failures and missed opportunities. The authors piloted the course during summer 2017 with students majoring in both engineering and business. This paper addresses the development, execution and assessment of this course. The development of the course included sequencing specific seminars on leadership and business topics with six business simulation scenarios. For each of the business simulation scenarios, the teams developed business plans, executed , and an after-action review to capture lessons learned. During the execution of the simulations, three-member student teams, with one member designated as the leader, operated a simulated brewery, making decisions on what to produce, what prices to set, and other critical decisions depending on the scenario. The ScrimmageSimTM software provided real-time reports on the status of the simulated company so the impacts of their business decisions were readily apparent. Each successive simulation featured additional options requiring more complicated business decisions. All team and students received feedback on their performance for each of the simulations. Teams presented their business plans and briefed on the lessons learned. The authors conducted an extensive end-of-course survey to assess the quality of the course and the contribution of the course to student learning about leadership, business and professional skills. The paper will detail the development and execution of the course as well as an assessment of how well the course met the stated objectives.