Leadership education for engineers: Engineering schools interest and practice

Abstract

Leadership has long been a hot topic in business and education, but until recently has not been a focus in science and engineering. Based on our experience in expanding the curriculum to incorporate a series of leadership courses for graduate engineering students, we were interested in knowing whether others were teaching leadership in their programs. We wanted access to information on other engineering programs that was not available in the literature, which led to developing a survey to gather this data. Our motivation for this research was based on experience as authors from industry. We noticed that academia was sub-optimizing the potential of engineers to fully exercise their knowledge, skill and other leadership capabilities in the workplace. This paper presents the motivation for our research, the process we used to gather the data, and assessment and evaluation of the responses. Examples of the current practice of providing leadership education to engineers are described and suggested alternatives are presented. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.