Conceptions of Engineering Leadership

and the Role of Universities

in Developing Engineering Leaders

Dr Andrew T.M. Phillips

A dissertation submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of

Master of Education, University Learning and Teaching

Imperial College London

June 2014

I declare that, except where explicit reference is made to the work of others,

this dissertation is the result of my own work and has not been submitted for

any other degree at Imperial College London or any other institution.

Dr Andrew T.M. Phillips

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

This document is available on figshare

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1198228

The author can be contacted at andrew.phillips@imperial.ac.uk

Conceptions of Engineering Leadership

and the Role of Universities

in Developing Engineering Leaders

Dr Andrew T.M. Phillips

Abstract

Civil engineering as a profession has undergone considerable changes

in recent years, with fragmentation of specialities and an increasing role

in setting the agenda in response to societal challenges. Within civil engi-

neering undergraduate education there is a sense of curriculum crowding,

with both learners and teachers experiencing knowledge content overload.

In the context of a research intensive university such as Imperial College

London undergraduate teaching must also be balanced with other teach-

ing, research and administrative commitments, as well as other professional

activities.

Through interviews with engineering leaders this dissertation seeks to

assess whether graduates, having completed an MEng degree in civil en-

gineering, are sufficiently prepared to take on roles within the engineering

profession, finding that in some respects desirable attributes are not ad-

dressed in current undergraduate teaching and learning practice. Through

interpretation of the interviews alongside a concepts review of appropriate

curriculum ideologies and learning models, it is concluded that the current

concept of a curriculum places too high an emphasis on the knowledge

dimension of learning, to the detriment of attributes associated with the

skills, attitudes and experience dimensions.

An interpretation of the engineering design process is presented as a

potential framework, beyond curriculum knowledge content, within which

to situate and assess current and changing teaching and learning practice.

Keywords: engineering education, knowledge, skills, attitudes, experi-

ence, leadership, education partnerships, engineering design process.

Word count: approximately 16,600 (excluding quotes).

i

Contents

Abstract i

Contents ii

Acknowledgements iv

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.2 Motivation for the study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

1.3 Research aim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2 Concepts review 6

2.1 Engineering Institution requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2.2 Curriculum ideologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2.3 Learning models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2.4 Learning and teaching within the disciplines . . . . . . . . . 13

2.5 Agenda for change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

3 Methods 24

3.1 Participant selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

3.2 Interviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

3.3 MBTI data collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

3.4 Ethical considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

3.5 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

4 Results and discussion 29

4.1 Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

4.2 Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

4.2.1 Communication and collaboration . . . . . . . . . . 34

4.2.2 Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

4.2.3 Convince . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

4.3 Attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

4.3.1 Curiosity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

4.3.2 Courage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

4.3.3 Respect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

4.3.4 Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

4.4 Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

4.5 Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

4.6 Engineering design process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

4.7 Education partnerships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

4.8 MBTI data analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

ii

5 Conclusions 59

6 Reflections 61

References 62

Appendices 67

List of Figures

1 Illeris’ learning model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2 Kolb’s learning model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

3 Interpretation of the Engineering Design Process . . . . . . 52

List of Tables

1 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) distributions . . . . . 56

2 MBTI category values on a normalised scale . . . . . . . . . 57

3 MBTI category percentage splits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

iii

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to all the staff in the Educational Development Unit. Particular

thanks go to my supervisor David Riley who has been a tremendous help

in navigating the treacherous waters between the disciplines.

Thanks go to my colleagues and friends in the Department of Civil

and Environmental Engineering who have been subjected to a barrage of

lunchtime discussions. In particular Ahmer Wadee, Leroy Gardner and

Lorenzo Macorini. Thanks also go to Becky Naessens, who has kept the

Group Design Projects on course while I have been busy as a student.

Thanks go to my fiancee, Jill Moore, who has suffered my extended

filing system incorporating most of any available space, while she has been

engaged in her own studies. Thanks also go to my family who remain ever

responsive to my considered thoughts, often disguised as rants.

Final thanks go to all of the participants who proved to be enthusiastic

in their support of the project, and with whom I am engaged in ongo-

ing discussions, which I hope will serve to promote new and continuing

partnerships between industry and academia.

Participants

• Mike Cook

Senior Partner and Chairman, Buro Happold

Adjunct Professor of Creative Design

Imperial College London

• John Lyle

Director, Advanced Technology and Research, Arup

• Ed McCann

Senior Director, Useful Simple Trust

Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Innovation

University College London

• Roger Ridsdill Smith

Senior Partner, Foster + Partners

• Nigel Tonks

Director, Arup

iv

1 Introduction

The focus of this work is on assessing the knowledge and understanding,

skills and attitude attributes that are considered beneficial in allowing grad-

uates of civil engineering MEng degree programmes to develop and become

engineering leaders. The work considers what role universities should have

in providing teaching and learning experiences directed towards allowing

students to develop these attributes.

Conceptions were sought from engineering leaders, based within well

regarded, international civil engineering and architectural consultancies.

This offers a perspective not often considered in educational studies where

a direct focus has been given to either students as learners, or academics as

teachers. The work may be considered as seeking those attributes associat-

ed with engineering excellence as opposed to compliance, with engineering

leadership taken as a demonstration of current or previous engineering ex-

cellence.

1.1 Background

Within Great Britain, North America and Europe traditional engineering

curricula have tended to focus on the acquisition of knowledge and under-

standing, with the development of skills and attitude characteristics given

less attention in comparison. However civil engineering courses in the UK

have undergone substantial curriculum changes over the last decade. The

prime driver of these changes may be considered to be the requirement

to complete a Master of Engineering (MEng) course rather than a Bache-

lor of Engineering (BEng) undergraduate course in order to enter a career

pathway directed towards achieving Charted Engineer (CEng) status. The

MEng Civil Engineering degree at a research intensive university such as

Imperial College London (Imperial) is subject to the demands of a range

of stakeholders with potentially competing agendas. These stakeholders

include students with a range of motivations, academics responsible for

delivering in both the teaching and research fields, engineering and non-

engineering industries interested in employing civil engineering graduates

and the Engineering Institutions. The Institutions (the Institution of Civil

Engineers (ICE), the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE), the

Charted Institution of Highways and Transportation, and the Institute

of Highways Engineers), through the Joint Board of Moderators (JBM)

provide accreditation, required for graduates to progress to Charted En-

gineering (CEng) status without undertaking a further degree course, to

those degrees which are ‘of an appropriate standard and cover the nec-

essary core civil engineering subjects such as materials, geotechnics, fluid

1

mechanics and structures’ (ICE).

This dissertation seeks to expand on concepts introduced in my library

project (Engineering education, research and design: breaking in and out

of liminal space (Phillips, 2012)) in terms of identifying common areas of

discussion between engineering students, educators, researchers and de-

signers, with an increased emphasis on curriculum design, focusing on the

development of skills and attitudes as well as core knowledge and under-

standing.

In brief my library project suggested that the distinguishing feature

of a civil engineering degree in Great Britain, North America and Europe

was development of the ability to design. It introduced the concept that

engineering education, research and design could be viewed as iterative

processes with learners, educators, researchers and designers required to

work in a state of flux, breaking in and out of liminal space. The ac-

quisition and participation metaphors, threshold concepts, liminal space,

divergent—convergent thinking, problem definition and problem solving,

were highlighted as being common narratives across engineering educa-

tion, research and design. Potential discourse between the need for en-

gineering students to develop deep knowledge and understanding as well

as the ability to generate innovative design concepts was commented on,

with the beneficial role of group design exercises in bridging the discourse

highlighted. In particular I introduced the concept of informed creativity

suggesting that there is a minimum level of knowledge and understanding

that must be achieved by the learner before creative design exercises can

be considered likely to result in realisable solutions, while also suggesting

that increased knowledge and understanding has the potential to allow cre-

ative as opposed to routine design thinking (Howard et al., 2008). It was

acknowledged that both staff and students may be resistant to accepting

creativity as a desirable characteristic for engineering graduates to devel-

op (Stouffer et al., 2004). In closing I highlighted that increasingly high

expectations are being placed on civil engineering graduates, commenting

that:

Only through encouraging self motivated life long learning and

reflective practice can we expect to equip them with the skills

and experience that they will require to assess and address the

problems that the world looks to them to solve.

(Phillips, 2012, page 11)

In this dissertation I explore conceptions of the desired knowledge and

understanding, skills and attitudes, that may allow a graduate to develop

into an engineering leader, and the role that universities should have in

developing these. This is done through conducting and analysing interviews

2

with established civil engineering leaders. I am interested in the conception

of engineering leadership as a way of being rather than necessarily as a job

title indicator.

1.2 Motivation for the study

My motivation for the study arose from my various roles at Imperial. The

primary motivation comes from my role as the lead for the Group Design

Projects1 carried out over a six week period at the end of the third year of

the four year MEng Civil Engineering degree course taught in the Depart-

ment of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Secondary motivators are

my roles as module coordinator for the first and second year Structural Me-

chanics courses on the MEng degree, module coordinator for the Structural

Analysis course delivered as part of the MSc Advanced Structural Engi-

neering Cluster, within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engi-

neering, and my role as Director of Education for the Royal British Legion

Centre for Blast Injuries Studies at Imperial College London, a transdisci-

plinary centre recruiting post-graduate students and post-doctoral research

associates from the natural sciences, engineering and medicine, with both

civilian and military backgrounds. I am also able to draw on experience

supervising PhD students and research associates within my own research

group, as well as final year MEng and MSc project students. I bring the

perspectives of my research in Structural Biomechanics and experiences of

outreach education through developing and running an Engineering Mas-

terclass as well as several other activities through the Royal Institution.

I am interested in the processes associated with the acquisition of core

engineering knowledge and understanding and the development of engineer-

ing and design skills. I am interested in whether these sometimes disparate

activities can be viewed from the perspective of a learning framework or

a design process, with a focus on developing engineering leadership, taken

as an indicator of engineering excellence.

The work described in this dissertation is informed from the ontological

and epistemological perspectives of pragmatism, constructivism and con-

structionism (Savin-Baden and Howell Major, 2013, ch 4). That is that I

see the ‘truth’ of an idea as dependent upon the efficacy and efficiency of

the explanation. I see the idea of ‘reality’ as dependent on the individual,

but believe that in a discipline such as civil engineering there must be a sig-

nificant component of shared social reality and truth in the form of shared

paradigms and shared symbolic representation and language. However the

formulation, verification, validation and falsification of paradigms (Popper,

1959, Kuhn, 1962) need not result from social construction.

1www.groupdesignprojects.org.uk

3

In conversations with academic colleagues and a number of industrial

contacts involved in the Group Design Projects recurring topics of discus-

sion have focused around broad and deep thinking, creativity and engineer-

ing leadership, echoing the focus of the institution guidelines as discussed

in Section 2.1. Specific aims of the work are to assess whether these de-

scriptions are useful concepts for those reflecting on careers in the civil en-

gineering industry and whether they accord with the attributes they look

for when recruiting civil engineering graduates. In seeking to investigate

these aims consideration was given to whether the conceptions of under-

graduate students, academics or industrialists would be most relevant to

collect and analyse. It was decided that with regards to conceptions of

the graduate attributes required to perform in industry the most relevant

group of people to consider were industrialists as this group is in the po-

sition of ‘living it’ or ‘having lived it’. This is not to discount the views

of either academics or undergraduate students, but allowed a pragmatic

focus to the scope of the dissertation. An additional consideration was

the stage of career trajectory that participant conception might be sought

at. Consideration was given to whether recent graduates, project leaders

or company leaders may be able to provide the most insight. Company

leaders were selected as those most likely to have had the opportunity

to critically reflect on the attributes that might have been instrumental

in their career trajectory, as well as to consider the attributes that they

would want a graduate to possess to provide a fit with the culture of their

respective companies. It was also decided to focus on civil engineering con-

sultancies in preference to civil engineering contractors, due to a specific

focus on design which I highlighted in my library project (Phillips, 2012).

I chose to focus on those engineering consultancies who have had an in-

volvement in the Group Design Projects or have otherwise demonstrated

a continued interest and involvement in dialogue between academia and

industry. While there are several cases of industrial engineering leaders

being involved in specific undergraduate activities the conceptions of this

group of stakeholders is not often taken as the perspective of interest in

engineering educational studies.

1.3 Research aim

The research aim of this work is to assess whether the concepts of broad

and deep knowledge and understanding, creativity and leadership have rel-

evance from the perspective of industrial engineering leaders. The work

assesses expanding these concepts in characterising the range of desirable

attributes potentially displayed by graduates of an MEng civil engineer-

ing degree programme, as taught at a research intensive university such

4

as Imperial. In this context engineering leadership and the potential for a

graduate to develop and become an engineering leader are taken as indica-

tions of engineering excellence.

The dissertation is divided into a number of sections: introduction, con-

cepts review, methods, results and discussion, conclusions and reflections,

with sections often divided into a number of subsections.

5

2 Concepts review

Prior to presenting the methods of investigation it is appropriate to review

those guidelines and concepts that may be considered as having relevance

to the teaching of engineering, in particular civil engineering at university.

2.1 Engineering Institution requirements

In order to be accredited by the JBM an MEng Civil Engineering Degree

must meet the criteria set out in the JBM MEng Guidelines. In these

guidelines it is stated that:

. . . an accredited MEng programme is intended to provide the

distinctive educational base that will produce graduates who are

practical, articulate, numerate, literate, imaginative, versatile,

confident and inquisitive. Such graduates should have the po-

tential to take responsibility for innovation, technology transfer

and change, looking for ways of exploiting emerging technolo-

gies and, where appropriate, promoting advanced designs and

design methods. They will need to possess creativity founded

upon a deep understanding of engineering principles and may

eventually control projects involving advanced technology that

require the management of risk, resources and large capital bud-

gets. (JBM MEng Guidelines, page 1)

An MEng programme should create the platform from which

individual aspirations to register as a Chartered Engineer can

develop, and therefore it is essential that a recognised minimum

of engineering science and technology be safeguarded within the

programme . . . There should be industrial involvement in both

the design and delivery of MEng programmes.

(JBM MEng Guidelines, page 2)

The essence of an MEng programme is the education of stu-

dents to an appropriate depth of understanding and breadth of

knowledge needed to work within and, eventually, to lead and

manage inter-disciplinary teams . . . it is designed for students

with high academic ability and motivation.

(JBM MEng Guidelines, page 2)

The guidelines go on to specify that programmes should contain at

least five core subjects, including structures, materials and geotechnics,

and at least two from fluid mechanics, surveying, transport infrastructure

engineering, public health, construction management, environmental engi-

neering and architectural technology, stating that:

6

These core subjects should reflect the aims of the degree pro-

gramme, and they should embrace theory, analysis, design and

engineering practice. They should also provide an appropriate

integration of the engineering sciences, mathematics, mechanics

and materials. (JBM MEng Guidelines, page 3)

The engineering subjects should:

. . . be taught in the context of design . . . with appropriate ac-

count of issues of sustainability, health and safety and construc-

tion. (JBM MEng Guidelines, page 3)

It is observed throughout the guidelines and associated annexes that

there is a focus on the desired qualities, traits and tacit skills of graduates,

rather than detailed identification of the core knowledge to be contained

in the curriculum.

The professional award of CEng status by the Engineering Institutions

is overseen by the Engineering Council (EC) who also provide guidelines on

what is expected from an accredited MEng degree course (EC Guidelines,

2013). The EC guidelines state that graduates from MEng courses:

. . . will have the ability to integrate their knowledge and un-

derstanding of mathematics, science, computer-based methods,

design, the economic, social and environmental context, and

engineering practice to solve a substantial range of engineering

problems, some of a complex nature. They will have acquired

much of this ability through involvement in individual and group

design projects, which have had a greater degree of industrial

involvement than those in Bachelors degree programmes.

(EC Guidelines, 2013, page 16)

As with the JBM guidelines it is observed throughout the EC guide-

lines that there is a focus on outcomes in terms of graduate characteris-

tics rather than specific curriculum context. In the UK there are a total

of 44 universities running accredited MEng Civil Engineering and related

courses (JBM Accredited Courses). Within both sets of guidelines it is

evident that value is placed on engineering leadership and creativity, with

the defining characteristic of a Chartered Engineer being the ability to de-

sign. Hence the guidelines provide an entry point into the topic and scope

of this dissertation.

While this dissertation, like my library project (Phillips, 2012), does not

seek to assess the guidelines developed by the EC or the JBM it is impor-

tant to develop the discussion and arguments contained in this dissertation

in the context of the accreditation requirements of the Engineering Insti-

tutions.

7

2.2 Curriculum ideologies

The role of the professional civil engineer has become increasingly complex

in recent years, with increased interaction between multiple engineering

and other discipline specialists. Increasingly society looks to professional

civil engineers to provide leadership of complex transdisciplinary projects.

Universities have responded to this societal need with what may be con-

sidered to be increasingly crowded or even conflicting curricula aimed at

providing tacit skills as well as deep knowledge and understanding. Re-

search has been carried out into alternative curriculum types. Although

much of this is based on the school system, perhaps due to the vast expan-

sion in curricula at the university level, it is useful to examine the proposed

curriculum types.

Schiro 2008, ch 1 describes four curriculum ideologies, two of which I

believe have specific relevance for the civil engineering undergraduate cur-

riculum at a research intensive university such as Imperial. The Scholar

Academic Ideology in which it is believed that knowledge should be organ-

ised based on the academic disciplines found at universities. In this cur-

riculum ideology an academic discipline is viewed as a hierarchical commu-

nity with enquirers (researchers or scholars) engaged in discovering ‘truth’,

teachers disseminating truth, and learners whose role is to ‘learn the truth

so that they may become proficient members of the discipline’. In this sense

the academic ideology draws comparisons with the communities of practice

described by Lave and Wenger (2003), although we are left with the ques-

tion of how the discovered and learned truth finds application outside of

the community of the academic discipline. The Social Efficiency Ideology

in which it is believed that the role of teaching and learning is to develop

students to the extent that they can meet the needs of and function as ma-

ture members of society. There is an emphasis on the graduating student

as an outcome of the ‘terminal objectives of the curriculum’, acquiring ‘the

behaviours prescribed by the curriculum’. Although skills are introduced,

these seem to be in the context of kinematic rather than cognitive function.

The question arises as to how knowledge and understanding are developed

or transferred within the the context of a curriculum based on this ideol-

ogy. The Learner Centred Ideology and the Social Reconstruction Ideology

in my view lack a sufficiently pragmatic perspective to achieve relevance

in engineering education. As commented on by Schiro:

The existence of the competing visions of what good education

consists of and the corresponding lack of understanding regard-

ing these visions among educators . . . causes confusion and dis-

comfort . . . ’ (Schiro, 2008, ch 1, page 2)

8

Is is clear that there are dangers in adopting any of the individual

ideologies in isolation. Comparisons can be drawn with the dangers of

adopting either the acquisition metaphor or the participation metaphor to

the exclusion of the other as highlighted by Sfard (1998).

Ross (2000, ch 1), taking as inspiration the words of Sir David Ec-

cles (UK Education Minister, 1954–57, 59–62) in signalling an increased

government involvement in setting an educational agenda by opening up

‘the secret garden of the curriculum’, describes four curriculum ideologies

based on the metaphor of garden types. Two of these gardens echo the

scholar academic and social efficiency ideology. The Baroque Curriculum

may be viewed as a metaphor for the scholar academic ideology, with the

Baroque garden enclosed ‘within a strong frame, defining what is within

and without the garden’. The Dig for Victory Curriculum may be viewed

as a metaphor for the social efficiency ideology, with a focus on education

providing skills of immediate use to society. As with the learner centred

and social reconstruction ideologies, the Naturally Landscaped Curriculum

may be considered to lack a sufficiently pragmatic aspect. The Cottage

Curriculum is viewed as a mix of curriculum ideologies ‘ossified in form

and function to the point that the reasons for their existence are simply

because they have always been like this’. The contemporary university cur-

riculum is perhaps best viewed from this perspective, developed through

competing ideologies, now resistant to change that might compromise the

stable balance between them.

In practice, as noted by Ross (2000) individual subjects, courses and

modules within a discipline specific curriculum are developed based on

the judgements and values of individual academics, who in my experience,

as educators rather than educationalists, will be unaware of competing

ideologies, selecting from one or several without conscious thought.

2.3 Learning models

It could be considered peculiar that from a teaching perspective the ques-

tion of ‘what should we teach?’ is often considered separately from the

question of ‘how should we teach it?’, while from a learning perspective

the single question might be ‘what is the most effective and efficient way

to learn what we are being taught?’. I believe it is therefore useful to

consider learning models in the context of this question. Although I have

characterised civil engineering education as spanning the scholar academic

and social efficiency ideologies, a research intensive university such as Im-

perial may be considered to be learner centred, not in that it places the

development of the learner above that of either the academic disciplines

or society, but in that responsibility for learner development is placed on

9

the learner. Hence it seems sensible to consider learning models in or-

der to provide a framework within which individual learners can position

themselves.

Many university educators have heard of Bloom’s taxonomy of learn-

ing (Bloom, 1956), although in my experience know little about it beyond

it providing a ranked list of different levels of learning. Few are aware of

the original intention to develop volumes specific to the cognitive (knowl-

edge), affective (attitude) and psychomotor (skills) domains. In a revision

of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al., 2001) the cognitive domain is inter-

preted as having knowledge and cognitive process dimensions, while also

reassessing some of the original knowledge categories. While the knowledge

(factual, conceptual, procedural, meta-cognitive) and cognitive process (re-

member, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create) dimensions resonate

with my experiences it is evident that the taxonomy is aimed at inform-

ing the debate surrounding standardisation of the curriculum as taught in

North American schools, with the examples used often covering minutiae of

a curriculum and in my view over assessing the levels of the taxonomy that

a particular task represents. It may be considered advantageous to have a

less prescriptive framework within which to situate university learning and

teaching.

Illeris (2003, 2009) presents a more complete learning model in which

he pulls together various strands of educational research, emphasising the

emotional and social aspects in addition to the cognitive aspect. This inter-

dependency between the cognitive, emotional and social domains has also

been recognised and developed by researchers such as Vygotsky (McLeod,

2014) and Bandura (1977). In the context of university and life long learn-

ing Illeris’ model is compelling, with the suggested four levels of learning

resonating with my experiences as a teacher and a learner. Cumulative

learning is described as an isolated process of learning where facts may be

learnt separately to each other. It may be compared to the factual and

remembering aspects of the revised taxonomy (Anderson et al., 2001) and

the acquisition metaphor (Sfard, 1998). Assimilative learning is described

as a linking process where new knowledge or truths are assimilated into an

existing framework. If the basis of the acquisition metaphor is the accumu-

lation of knowledge blocks, assimilative learning may be considered to be

the process of building using these blocks to form a knowledge structure.

Accommodative or transcendent learning is described as the deconstruc-

tion and reconstruction of part of an existing knowledge scheme. Within

the context of university teaching it may be compared to threshold con-

cepts (Meyer and Land, 2003, 2005, Cousin, 2010), in that it represents

troublesome learning, requiring the learner to be guided into a liminal

10

space, emerging with a revised view of both the threshold and associated

concepts. The accumulative and assimilative levels of learning are tak-

en from Piaget’s work on the cognitive development of children (McLeod,

2012). Piaget discusses states of equilibrium and dis-equilibrium which

may be taken as equivalent to entering a liminal state, while the zone of

proximal development proposed by Vygotsky may also be considered to

be a liminal space. Transformative learning is described as being ‘charac-

terised by simultaneous restructuring in the cognitive, the emotional and

social-societal dimensions’. It is described as occurring ‘as the result of a

crisis-like situation’. Given this definition the phrase ‘transformative learn-

ing’ seems overused within both academia and industry, or at least occurs

less often than can be suggested (Dirkx, 1998). However if transformative

learning is viewed as a process by which a learner’s preconceived schema

are challenged in any one of the cognitive, emotional and social dimensions,

forcing the learner into a liminal space, then transformative learning may

be considered to describe a broader range of learning experiences.

In addition to the four learning levels Illeris introduces a diagrammatic

representation of the learning model, as two double headed arrows with the

individual at the intersection. The fully developed diagram is reproduced

in Figure 1.

11

acquistion

mentalCbalancemeaningability

interCCCaction

integration

ENVIRONMENT

EMOTION

SENSIBILITYFUNCTIONALITY

SOCIALITY

COGNITION

SOCIETY

Figure 1: The processes and dimensions of learning (Reproduced from Illeris(2003))

12

Within the learning model Illeris identifies two reasons why intended

learning may not be realised. Defence may be seen as a passive sifting

or coping mechanism. It is accepted that ‘nobody can manage to remain

open to the gigantic volumes of influences we are all’ exposed to. Defence

is linked with the concept of everyday consciousness where the learner uses

preconceptions of thematic areas of knowledge to decide how to respond

to new influences. Resistance may be seen as an active process where the

learner interrogates new influences or knowledge. Illeris comments that

‘great steps forward in the development of mankind and society have taken

place when someone did not accept a truth or way of doing or understand-

ing things’. When discussing transformative learning Illeris is influenced

by the work of Mezirow (Mezirow, 2009) who draws a clear distinction

between instrumental and communicative learning, characterising the for-

mer as hypothetical deductive and the later as analogical abductive, where

communicative discourse is associated with judgement. The two modes of

learning can be compared to quantitative and qualitative learning, often

used to distinguish between engineering and the sciences, and arts and the

humanities.

2.4 Learning and teaching within the disciplines

Biglan (1973a, 1973b) followed by Kolb (1981) demonstrated differences

between university subjects or disciplines, suggesting that learning styles

differed between the disciplines. Based on a multidimensional analysis of

academics’ judgement of the similarities of subject matter in different sub-

ject areas, Biglan (1973a) classified subjects according to three different

dimensions, with a fourth dimension introduced based on analysis of data

from a liberal arts college in addition to that from the University of Illinois.

The paradigm dimension provides an indication of the degree to which the

discipline relies on paradigm, considered as a body of theory which is sub-

scribed to by members of a discipline (Kuhn, 1962). This dimension is often

used to distinguish the natural sciences and engineering from social sciences

and the humanities. Biglan describes the dimension, in what could be con-

sidered a divisive manner, as ‘hard-soft’ (Biglan, 1973b). The application

dimension provides an indication of whether a discipline is considered to be

concerned with application to practical problems (‘pure-applied’). The life

systems dimension provides an indication of whether a discipline is consid-

ered to be concerned with life systems (‘life systems - non-life systems’).

The creative dimension provides an indication of whether a discipline is

considered to be creative or empirical (‘creative-empirical’). This dimen-

sion was not identified through those subjects studied at the university,

but was identified when examining the full range of subjects offered by

13

the liberal arts college. Civil engineering within Biglan’s analysis was con-

sidered to be hard, applied, more concerned with non-life systems than

life systems, and more creative than empirical. Biglan (1973b) also found

significant differences across the disciplines between social connectedness,

commitment with regard to teaching and research, and scholarly output.

Kolb (1981) introduces a dialectic learning model with similarities to

Jung’s (1921) concept of psychological types. Kolb describes learning as

based on a four stage cycle as illustrated in Figure 2 with the stages shown

opposite each other considered to be in dialectic tension between one an-

other.

Concrete experience

Formation of abstract

concepts and generalisations

Testing implications

of concepts in new situationsObservations and reflections

Figure 2: The experiential learning model (Reproduced from Kolb (1981))

The concrete-abstract tension is seen as cognitive development from a

phenomenalistic (concrete) view of the world to a constructivist (abstract)

view. The second tension is seen as a movement from an egocentric (active

testing) to an internalised integrative (reflective) form of knowledge. Jung’s

work is influential in the development of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

(MBTI) which can be used to give an indication of personality types. This

is used amongst a number of other factors in selecting group members for

the Group Design Projects and is discussed further in Sections 3.3 and 4.8

of this dissertation.

In a similar approach to Biglan (1973a) different disciplines are cate-

gorised depending upon their position along each of these dialectic tensions.

Based on a large sample of 800 practising managers and graduate students

in management, Kolb found that, although the individuals shared the same

occupation, their learning styles, indicating their position on the concrete-

abstract and active-reflective dimensions, were associated with their under-

graduate majors. Based on a sample of 234 individuals, engineering was

placed close to the whole sample mean in both the concrete-abstract and

active-reflective dimensions, although ‘on the average fell into the conver-

gent quadrant’ where the four quadrants were: accommodators (concrete

active), divergers (concrete reflective), assimilators (abstract reflective) and

convergers (abstract active). Neither Biglan or Kolb report ranges which

give an indication of the variability of responses within a discipline. Kolb’s

learning model is seen as similar to the problem solving process (Kolb,

1976). Kolb (1981) revisits Biglan’s data seeing the concrete–abstract and

14

soft–hard dimensions, and the active–reflective and the applied–pure di-

mensions as equivalent. It is interesting to note that ‘concrete’ and ‘soft’

are seen as similar concepts in the categorisation of disciplines, although the

words themselves could also be seen as polar opposites in contexts such as

problem solving. Using this interpretation civil engineering as well as other

engineering disciplines are moved further into the active abstract (applied

hard) quadrant. As well as revisiting Biglan’s data, Kolb adapts data from

the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education 1969 study of American

colleges and universities. The interpretation of this data seems somewhat

arbitrary, with the active–reflective dimension based on academic faculty

consultancy activities and the concrete–abstract dimension based on two

questions on the relative importance of mathematics and the humanities to

a specific discipline. A discipline is considered to be concrete (soft) based

on a low importance of mathematics and a high importance of the human-

ities, and abstract (hard) based on a high importance of mathematics and

a low importance of the humanities. On this simplistic final analysis civil

engineering is moved close to the extreme of the active abstract (hard)

quadrant, while other engineering disciplines are moved to the extreme of

the abstract (hard) axis, apparently indicating the importance of mathe-

matics to the discipline of engineering to be higher than the importance

of mathematics to the discipline of mathematics. That the analysis allows

such ludicrous conclusions to be drawn is perhaps an indication of how

far removed it has become from the initial dimensional concepts expressed

by Biglan. These being the degree to which a subject relies on paradigm,

where paradigm as considered by Kuhn (1962) refers to a body of theory

that is subscribed to by all members of a field, and the application of a

discipline to practical problem solving. I question categorisation of disci-

plines in such a simplistic manner, although the concept that personality

types and learning styles vary within and across disciplines remains useful.

Kolb (1981), separately to the categorisation of disciplines, introduces

three levels of learning considered as development stages of the human

growth process, acquisition, specialisation and integration. He comments

that ‘specialisation extends through formal education or career training

and early experiences of adulthood in work and personal life . . . this stage,

in our thinking, terminates at mid career, although the specific chronology

of the transition to [integration] will vary widely from person to person

and from one career path to another’. In introducing levels of learning it

is suggested that development to each level is marked by ‘increasing com-

plexity and and relativism in dealing with the world and one’s experiences,

and by higher-level integrations of the dialectic conflicts between the four

primary adaptive modes’ (shown in Figure 2). Symbolic complexity, percep-

15

tual complexity, affective complexity and behavioural complexity are viewed

as being linked to development of abstract, reflective, concrete and active

stages respectively, with integration only achievable through experiential

learning taking place in all four stages of the cycle. Kolb envisages learning

development as taking place within a cone extending from the circular base

of the four stages of the learning cycle, extending due to increasing com-

plexity, transitioning across the three levels of learning towards an apex.

We are left with a contrast between Illeris’ and Kolb’s models of learning,

where one allows for the expansions of learning while one suggests that

learning closes towards a defined point. To me expansion seems the more

optimistic of the two visions, although both indicate that learners must be

active in striving for higher levels of learning.

Jarvis and others (Jarvis et al., 1998, Jarvis, 2009) find limitations with

Kolb’s learning cycle, commenting that it ‘is too simple to reflect the real-

ity of the complex social process of human learning’, while complimenting

Illeris’ more comprehensive theory. Although Jarvis arrives at an alterna-

tive learning model this may be considered to be too involved to allow the

novice learner to immediately recognise the various stages. Significantly

Jarvis sees learning as both an experiential and existential process, with

the learning process seen as encompassing more than the individual as a

thinker. Jarvis views learning as relating to three transformations, those

in which the person senses the world, those in which the person is changed

through experiencing the world, and those in which the person is changed

through social interaction. The manner in which the person experiences

and socially interacts with society are shaped by past learning. Similari-

ties can be drawn between the learning model presented by Jarvis and the

design, situated function—behaviour—structure (FBS) framework) model

presented by Gero and Kannengiesser (2004). Both models present iter-

ative processes, where the actual outcome is compared to the expected

outcome, with the learner and designer respectively, becoming more ex-

perienced as a result of the process, although the respective fields seem

to have developed isolated from each other in the literature. In the FBS

framework function, behaviour and structure consider the questions, ‘What

is it for?’, ‘What does it do?’ and ‘What is it?’ respectively.

Civil engineering can be considered to be at the interface between the

natural sciences and the social sciences. Civil engineers are expected to

have a strong grounding in mathematics and physics, as well as aspects

of material science, chemistry and biology, and should be able to apply

knowledge and understanding in these domains for the benefit of society.

It is often said that scientists observe and attempt to explain the world as

it is, while engineers manipulate the world for the benefit of society. When

16

speaking to colleagues, being an engineer has been compared to being an

artist whose works must must satisfy society as well as the artist them-

self. In the context of benefiting society there is an increasing emphasis

on preventing harm to one section of society in order to benefit another

section of society. This concept is embedded within the field of sustainabil-

ity, sometimes expressed as ‘people, planet, profit’. Engineering academics

and students often emphasise the differences between engineering and oth-

er disciplines, as well as the differences between the individual engineering

disciplines. Civil engineering may be considered to be the second oldest

engineering discipline, originally arising as a separate discipline to mili-

tary engineering. It is therefore a welcome development that an increasing

amount of educational research is being carried out within the academic

disciplines, recognising differences as well as similarities between them.

Kreber brings together a diverse range of contributors to examine learn-

ing and teaching within and beyond disciplines (Kreber, 2009a). The col-

lection is of particular interest as it contains several reactive chapters,

responses from educators to chapters written by educationalists, giving

practical relevance to the work discussed. While the distinction between

an educator and an educationalist might seem slight, I see it as important,

relating to the primary disciplinary perspective that each will approach

teaching and learning from. Kreber highlights that ‘there is now a growing

awareness that in a world characterised by rapid change, complexity and

uncertainty, problems do not present themselves as distinct subjects but

increasingly within transdisciplinary contexts, thereby calling for graduate

outcomes that go beyond specialist knowledge and skills . . . a key question

. . . is whether the teaching of specialised skills and knowledge in partic-

ular contexts can be balanced with the teaching of more ‘generic’ ones,

without compromising the integrity of academic programs on offer’. It is

emphasised that within a modern British university education:

Success is defined by students not only learning lots about a

subject, but knowing how they learned it and why what they

learned matters to their understanding of an interaction with

the world around them. As students acquire certain bodies of

knowledge, procedures, conceptual tools, practices and even val-

ues within the particular contexts of our various subjects, their

learning is context-specific but also ‘context-transcendent’. (em-

phasis in original). (Kreber, 2009b)

Disciplines have been part of the fabric of universities since their found-

ing in the middle ages. Students were expected to demonstrate competence

in the trivium of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric (concepts which remain

in some European education systems) prior to studying the quadrivium of

17

arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Upon completion of the triv-

ium and quadrivium students were awarded a Bachelor of the Arts degree

and were free to pursue study in what could be regarded as the professions

of the time. Hence universities prior to the nineteenth century were con-

sidered to provide an education which prepared students for professional

or vocational roles. The dual roles of the modern university in research

and education can be considered to have developed in Germany around

1810 when Wilhelm von Humboldt (then Prussian Minister of Education)

outlined his vision for the University of Berlin as an institution where both

teaching and research should take place. Within the civil engineering pro-

fession, the Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in 1818 giving an

indication of its origins as a modern rather than ancient discipline and

one which has developed in response to industrialisation and the needs of

society.

Donald (2002) considers engineering to be, ‘Hard thinking: applying

structured knowledge to unstructured problems’, commenting that ‘in en-

gineering programs there is a continual tug-of-war between the theoretical

and the professional’. Engineering students are considered to be more

self-reliant and focused than students from arts and science programmes.

Engineering students ‘will have mathematical and physical science skills,

will be able to act on logical evidence, and will be able to work with

others’, while problem solving and design are frequently used to describe

the thinking processes required and developed on engineering programmes.

Through speaking with engineering academics Donald found that engineer-

ing students were expected to change their ways of thinking compared to

school: ‘whenever there is a way to go through school without thinking,

unfortunately that way is taken more often than not by most students’. In

a discussion with colleagues in the Department of Civil and Environmen-

tal Engineering about the prior mathematics knowledge of undergraduate

students it was felt that in the UK the school mathematics curriculum fo-

cuses on tricks to carry out particular procedures without setting these in

the context of the subject. The same academic quoted by Donald (2002)

comments:

I have students who have tremendous marks, and can memorise

everything, and they come in and show me that they can do

any number of problems. But when I ask them why are you

doing this step in this problem they respond “because that is

the way you did it.” When I ask them why do you think I did

it this way, or ask what if I gave you another problem that is

similar to this one and another one combined, but not exactly

either, the student usually responds, “I can’t do it because I

18

have never seen it before.” Their knowledge is all memorised

and there is no understanding, and what is worse is that there

is a tremendous fear even to consider how they would approach

a problem they have not seen before. (emphasis added)

This from experience seems to be one of the central issues that engi-

neering academics should and do attempt to address. On the one hand

engineering students and graduates must be well versed in the hard or

fixed paradigms of mathematics and physics, while on the other hand they

must be prepared to interrogate what they are taught and experience from

a similar perspective to those disciplines with soft or unfixed paradigms.

It struck me as curious that Donald (2009) states ‘one of the most dis-

quieting findings from these studies across disciplines is that students in

one program of study are experiencing a totally different education from

students in another’. I would find it disturbing if this was not the case,

the statement seems to undervalue the discipline specific contribution to

both learning and teaching. It could be considered disquieting however

if students and academics were unaware of the discipline specific nature

of learning and teaching. Matthew and Pritchard (2009) in response to

Donald (2009), also discussed in this work, have reservations about the

use of the hard-soft dimension to categorise disciplines, commenting that

“‘hard” and “soft” place a certain, though implicit value on the disciplines

. . . [which] are not helpful in promoting new thinking about the “how and

why” of teaching and learning within particular disciplines’.

Civil engineering courses in both the UK and North America have been

through, and continue to go through, change in order to develop students

beyond the technical foundations of engineering science. It is useful to

consider what barriers there might be to change and whether there is an

appropriate balance between specialist and generalist knowledge and skills

influences. Can change damage as well as benefit civil engineering as a

taught and professional discipline?

2.5 Agenda for change

In a series of reports the Royal Academy for Engineering (Spinks et al.,

2006, RAEng, 2007, 2010, 2012) has emphasised the need for changes to

undergraduate engineering degree courses in the UK and abroad. The

most recent of these reports focuses on the requirements for successful

change without detailing the specifics of what changes might be required.

While for engineering academics this could be interpreted as frustrating it

perhaps gives an indication of the vast range of engineering courses taught

in the UK and abroad, with specific suggestions for changes likely to have

relevance for specific subsets. The 2007 report states:

19

No factor is more critical in underpinning the continuing health

and vitality of any national economy than a strong supply of

graduate engineers equipped with the understanding, attitudes

and abilities necessary to apply their skills in business and other

environments.

Today, business environments increasingly require engineers who

can design and deliver to customers not merely isolated products

but complete solutions involving complex integrated systems.

Increasingly they also demand the ability to work in globally

dispersed teams across different time zones and cultures.

(RAEng, 2007, page 4)

While the 2012 report comments:

No profession unleashes the spirit of innovation like engineering.

Few professions turn so many ideas into so many realities. Few

have such a direct and positive effect on people’s everyday lives.

(RAEng, 2012, page 1)

In a recent TEDx talk2 by one of our undergraduate students, civ-

il engineering is described as the ‘essential profession’, highlighting that

engineers must engage with global debates, while society should welcome

engineers to these debates.

The pivotal role of engineers in society is increasingly recognised and

the agenda for educational change should focus on preparing engineer-

ing graduates for this. There is an agenda for change, however there are

circumstances that may prevent change from occurring. Just as there are

boundaries between the disciplines within a university there are boundaries

between academic and industrial disciplines that must be broken down in

order for change to occur. Reimann (2009) seeks to explore disciplines

through ways of thinking and practicing (WTP). The emphasis in WTP is

on academics being given the opportunity to reflect on, compare and con-

trast discipline specific practice, such that in their teaching they may make

the implicit, explicit. This can be compared to giving academics the op-

portunity to reflect on troublesome knowledge through the use of threshold

concepts within specific disciplines (Land et al., 2008). While the discus-

sion of threshold concepts may assist in the recollection of how specific

knowledge and understanding was developed, WTP may assist in the rec-

ollection of the attitudes and behaviours adopted in becoming part of the

professional engineering community. WTP resonates with the concept of

communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 2003) and could be considered

2TEDx talk available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOIJGGgaSIY

20

as shifting focus from teacher-centred teaching to student-centred teaching

while maintaining the teacher as the expert guiding the learner into society.

WTP is compatible with the development of learning partnerships as

a way of educating students for self-authorship and self-definition (Bax-

ter Magolda, 2002, 2009). Self-authorship can be viewed a similar to the

context of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977) and academic motivation (Schunk,

1991, Zimmerman, 2000), although I argue it is presented in a more ap-

plicable context. Baxter Magolda (2009) makes clear that the majority of

students do not develop self-authorship until several years after they have

graduated, often going through difficult and challenging life experiences

before achieving a sense of self. It is suggested that:

A primary reason self-authorship remained elusive during col-

lege was the lack of emphasis on developing an internal sense

of self. Students learned disciplinary content and processes for

thinking about it and applying it. It was not until after college,

however, that their employers and graduate educators stressed

that their thinking, knowing, and applying their perspectives

to their work all hinged on their internal values and how they

defined themselves.

Baxter Magolda (2009) presents a learning partnerships model in which

learners are transitioned from support to challenge. At the support–challenge

interface two sets of paired principles and challenges seem particularly im-

portant: validating learners’ capacity to know, leading to acknowledgement

that the self is central to knowledge construction, and defining learning

as mutually constructing meaning, leading towards shared authority and

expertise. In my experience neither of these can be achieved without con-

ceptual change in the learner with the transition from requiring support

to embracing challenge sometimes seen in postgraduate research students.

This may be due to life experiences external to the university environment

as well as the extended nature of the challenge encountered within post-

graduate research degrees. Baxter Magolda includes a further principle

and challenge: situating learning in learners’ experience and portraying

knowledge as complex and socially constructed. Within the academic dis-

cipline of civil engineering both of these present particular challenges. Few

learners and not all teachers will have experience of civil engineering as

an industrial discipline, while there is a significant knowledge hurdle to be

overcome before learners can engage in social construction of knowledge.

However the concept of a knowledge partnership in a similar manner to

threshold concepts permits discussion of knowledge and culture between

teachers and learners allowing learning to be viewed as an enterprise or an

endeavour that is not at the extremes of either learner or teacher-centred

21

learning. In this respect self-authorship within an educational context is

interlinked with the concept of learners as self-regulated and self-directed

(Jarvis et al., 1998, Zimmerman, 2002). Teachers can support learners

in developing self-regulation by challenging them to arrive at solutions

through their own mental effort rather than by providing solutions for

them to work towards. Zimmerman (2002) comments ‘if a student fails to

understand some aspect of a lesson in class, he or she must possess the

self-awareness and strategic knowledge to take corrective action. Even if

it were possible for teachers to accommodate every student’s limitation at

any point during the school day, their assistance could undermine the most

important aspect of this learning — a student’s development of a capability

to self-regulate’.

In considering the agenda for change, which can be viewed as focus-

ing on bringing about conceptual change in the approaches adopted by

learners, consideration must also be given as to how change can be en-

acted by teachers, and whether industry and institution desire for change

can be reconciled with the competing responsibilities and motivations of

engineering academics. I believe it must be acknowledged that disciplines

and academics at research intensive universities, despite modest efforts to

the contrary, are arranged as territories and tribes (Trowler, 2009, Becher

and Trowler, 2001), with boundaries protected and defended, from both

a conceptual and physical perspective. The organisational structures of

research intensive universities, perhaps out of historical convenience, seem

unsuited to the development of an alternative more open culture, designed

to encourage rather than restrict transdisciplinary discussion. The cultures

of tribes and territories are influential across research, teaching and admin-

istration. Each academic discipline may be considered as a community of

practice with specific teaching and learning regimes (TLRs) (Fanghanel,

2009), hidden to those embedded within them, but becoming evident to

newcomers. On the macroscale this may appear to be a dismal scenario,

however it overlooks the relative freedom with which individual academics

and significant networks may act with at the microscale and mesoscale.

Significance networks as proposed by Roxa and Matensson (2009) may be

considered to be those networks formed through everyday open but pri-

vate conversations and dialogues between colleagues. They are unlikely

to be organised around a predefined hierarchical structure and are unlike-

ly to be overly influenced by public organisational statements of policy.

Significance networks have the potential to act as agents of change if ef-

fective approaches are made to engage with them at all levels within a

hierarchical organisational structure. The findings of one of the most re-

cent Royal Academy of Engineering reports (RAEng, 2012) support this

22

view alongside other critical features of success and failure in implementing

change. Civil engineering is both an academic discipline and a profession.

In addition to the boundaries observed between academic disciplines this

introduces a further potential barrier between academia and industry, one

that must be broken down if civil engineering degree courses are to remain

relevant to employers.

In choosing to interview industry focused engineering leaders prime

motivators were to assess what knowledge and understanding, skills and

attitudinal characteristics prospective employers seek in graduate civil en-

gineers and to what extent these are addressed within current curricula

at research intensive universities, as well as whether the specific mix of

characteristics was subject to change through career trajectories.

23

3 Methods

In conducting the research work discussed in this dissertation I took a prag-

matic orientation (Savin-Baden and Howell Major, 2013) based on choosing

a methodology which seemed best aligned with the aims of the research. In

seeking conceptions of engineering leadership it seemed most appropriate

to seek the views of engineering leaders themselves. In order to provide a

rich text on which to base the analysis more quantitative methods such as

questionnaires were rejected in favour of a qualitative approach, taking the

form of semi-structured interviews. The work intends to provoke debate

over possible knowledge and understanding, skill and attitudinal character-

istics that may enable an individual to develop into an engineering leader.

It should assist those involved in civil engineering education in considering

the graduate skill-sets expected and required by industry. The research

was carried out based on a pragmatic approach (Ibid, ch 11) influenced

by modified and constructivist grounded theory approaches (Ibid, ch 12),

accepting that saturation was unlikely to be achieved within the scope of

the work. Following completion of the dissertation I plan to run a follow-

up focus group as well as investigating optimal approaches to embedding

industry involvement in educational practice.

During the course of the study it became apparent that there is an

interest in the distribution of personality types amongst undergraduate

engineering students (Shen et al., 2007). I considered that it would be in-

teresting to include anonymised MBTI data collected as part of a skills and

experience questionnaire carried out to assign students to groups during

the Group Design Projects, to assess whether desired graduate character-

istics showed correspondence or discord with recorded student personality

types.

3.1 Participant selection

Interview participants were selected based on their roles as engineering

leaders within renowned engineering and architectural consultancies (Arup,

Buro Happold, Expedition Engineering, Foster+Partners). All of the par-

ticipants were known to me beforehand due to their involvement with

group design exercises on the MEng Civil Engineering degree at Imperial

or through their involvement in other activities at the interface between

education and industry. In particular Mike Cook (Adjunct Professor of

Creative Design at Imperial College London) delivers a series of Creative

Design weeks to the first and second year civil engineering students on the

undergraduate course at Imperial College London, which together with the

Constructionarium (Ahearn et al., 2005), developed by Ed McCann (Roy-

24

al Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Innovation at University

College London) and others, is a prerequisite for the Group Design Projects

carried out in third year. The participants are also known to each other

independent of this research, with some involved in ongoing industry and

institution discussions on the concepts of how creative and innovative de-

sign should be taught to civil engineering undergraduates. As such this

work must be considered from the perspective of constructivist grounded

theory (Savin-Baden and Howell Major, 2013, Ch 12) as part of an on-

going discussion between all of the participants, including myself. Five

interviews were conducted in total. Although this could be considered to

be a limited sample the number of potential participants is itself limited

due to deliberately targeted sampling of a rarefied group of individuals.

All of the participants were white males. This was not due to deliberate

sampling but is considered at this time to be representative of the majority

of engineering leaders.

3.2 Interviews

A semi-structured approach was adopted with an interview schedule (Ap-

pendix A) composed of a set of main questions with sets of follow-up ques-

tions. The main questions are set out below:

1. What civil engineering projects are you working on at the moment?

2. What career path did you take to get to your current job?

3. What do you understanding by the phrase ‘engineering leadership’?

4. How would you describe your role as a civil engineering leader?

5. When appointing a graduate civil engineer what characteristics do

you look for?

6. What do you think the role of universities is in developing civil engi-

neers?

7. What do you think the role of universities is in developing engineering

leaders?

8. Is there anything you would like to add?

The first two interview questions were designed to allow the participants

to consider their own skill-sets in the context of civil engineering projects

they were currently working on and their own career progression. Ques-

tions three and four sought to investigate their conceptions of engineering

leadership and how these aligned with their roles within their respective

firms. Questions five, six and seven were designed to assess the skill-sets

they thought recent graduates should possess and whether the concept of

25

engineering leadership should be addressed within the MEng curriculum.

Question eight was included to allow them to reflect on their thoughts and

revisit any part of the interview if desired. Follow-up questions were de-

signed to allow for particular areas of interest to be reflected on within the

interview subject to time constraints. Interviews were scheduled to last

a period of one hour, although in practice they ranged in length from 54

minutes to 106 minutes, with an average of around 70 minutes. All inter-

views were conducted face-to-face in meeting rooms at the offices of the

participants respective companies. When beginning each interview I took

care to emphasise that I was seeking the opinions and views of the inter-

viewee, and was careful not to introduce any prior conceptions that I held

except for those that were evident in the design of the interview schedule.

Responses to particular questions were revisited where time permitted to

seek clarification of opinions and views. Interviews were conducted with

varying periods of time between each, ranging from two days to one month.

This allowed some reflection in between each interview, with the focus of

follow-up questions in each interview varied based on perceived areas of

agreement and discourse.

Prior to the interview all participants were sent a participant informa-

tion sheet (Appendix B) as well as a participant consent form (Appendix

C).

3.3 MBTI data collection

For the past four years four questions have been included in the skills

and experience survey, completed by all students prior to commencing the

Group Design Projects, which are considered to be suggestive of a Myers-

Briggs personality type3. In the context of the Group Design Projects this

information is used to avoid a dominance of a single personality type within

a group, although further analysis has not been carried out prior to now.

This year groups were informed of the personality types of their members,

as students expressed an interest, that this could be useful in developing an

understanding of group dynamics. For each of the four questions students

are asked to position themselves on a ten point Likert scale between two

statements. The statements are repeated below with the MBTI dimensions

they are suggested to relate to shown in parenthesis. The dimensions are

not indicated in the questionnaire. The underlined letters are then com-

bined to give one of sixteen different personality types. There are many

criticisms of the MBTI itself, and while the use of just four questions to

assign an MBTI is not standard practice, it may be considered justified

given the potential survey fatigue suffered by undergraduate students.

3en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

26

Place yourself on the SCALE between the two statements. The

nearer you place yourself to one of the statements indicates how

much you think that statement is representative of you:

• I like to...

meet new people and take action. (Extrovert).

reflect on my thoughts and ideas. (Introvert).

• I trust the...

tangible and like the specific details. (Sensing).

abstract and like to generalise a pattern. (Intuition).

• I make decisions...

through detached, rational and logical thought. (Thinking).

by getting a feel for the situation and looking for consensus.

(Feeling).

• I prefer to...

have matters settled. (Judging).

keep decisions open. (Perceiving).

3.4 Ethical considerations

Ethical approval was sought and obtained following minor amendments

through the Education Ethics Review Process (EERP). The approved

ethics application is included as Appendix D. As the interview participants

were not students or colleagues potential power issues are minimised, al-

though a potential power issue of believed influence over the curriculum

was identified this was not observed during any of the interviews. No

incentives were offered for being a participant in the study.

A significant variation from a standard ethics application was the in-

clusion of an option for the participant’s contribution to be acknowledged.

This was included to recognise the time spent by the participants con-

tributing to the work, and as discussed in the ethics application, has the

potential to add legitimacy and validation to the study on the occasion

that its findings are presented within Imperial or to a wider audience such

as the engineering institutions. All participants indicated that they wished

their contribution to the study to be acknowledged or that they did not

mind whether it was acknowledged or not. Specific quotes, opinions and

views have been anonymised in this dissertation in accordance with the

ethics application, participant information sheet and participant consent

form. Participant contributions are recognised in the acknowledgements.

Although specific ethics approval was not sought for use of the MBTI

data, this was fully anonymised prior to being analysed as part of the

study, with the original data collected as part of a questionnaire designed

27

to improve the student experience during the Group Design Projects.

3.5 Analysis

Interviews were recorded using a digital voice recorder, which was checked

for audio clarity prior to conducting the interviews. Transcripts of the in-

terview recordings were obtained from commercial transcribers (UK Tran-

scription) to level three verbatim, which includes pauses, ums and ers and

false starts. These were checked for accuracy against the original recording

by myself and any necessary corrections were made. Corrections were found

to be minor, mainly relating to specific acronyms or company names. The

corrected transcripts were then read once in their entirety without com-

menting, before being read for a second time highlighting specific passages.

The transcripts were read for a third time and codified according to the

a priori identified themes of core knowledge and understanding, practical

experience including group working, deep and broad thinking, creativity

and leadership. Following this the transcripts were read for a fourth time

and codified based on additional conceptions, agreement and discourse.

Specific passages were marked with index tabs to aid recall. All analysis

was carried out by hand on printouts of the transcripts. Transcripts were

read in a different order each time to promote concept comparison. Addi-

tional hand written notes were kept at each stage of the analysis process,

with specific keywords highlighted and grouped under common conceptions

during the final two readings of the transcripts. Where quotes are taken

from the transcripts these are assigned a participant number (assigned at

random prior to the analysis). Samples of an annotated transcript and

loose leaf analysis notes are shown in Appendix E.

Data for each of the four MBTI questions was analysed by adjusting

the ten point Likert score to a normalised (-1 → +1) scale. Results are

reported for each dimension as well as combined dimension type indicators.

28

4 Results and discussion

It is not possible to report the full extent of the analysis of the interview

transcripts carried out, within the scope of this dissertation, although the

main conceptions relating to engineering education, engineering leadership,

and the engineering design process are developed. Through the selection

of certain quotations I have tried to give an indication of what can be

considered as effective but also what can be considered as ineffective in

each of these areas. Minor changes have been made to the quotes to remove

pauses, ums and ers, and false starts, unless these were considered to add

context to the quote.

It was found that the process of becoming an engineer, which seems

sensible to consider to be the aim of engineering education, or developing

engineering thinking could be viewed from knowledge, skills, attitudes and

experience perspectives. The first three of these are discussed in the con-

text of gaining vocational competence by Baartman and Bruijin (2011).

Although these perspectives cannot be fully disentangled from each other

I believe there is a value in examining to what extent university education

addresses each of them. It is evident that the knowledge perspective is of-

ten given elevated status when considering engineering curricula, although

specific knowledge topics were rarely discussed during the interviews. This

may be due to the nature of the interview questions but is considered to

indicate that engineering education should engage with each of the per-

spectives. The concept of engineering as a design process requiring specific

skills developed primarily from one of the interviews, although confirma-

tion was found in the transcripts of all five interviews. Interpretation of the

interview transcripts also suggested that civil engineering could be viewed

as a discipline in which there is a high knowledge barrier to overcome be-

fore graduates can engage with discipline specialists, as well as engaging

with other disciplines through the lens of their domain.

All participants made a distinction between infrastructure engineering

(considered as civil engineering) and building engineering, covering struc-

tural engineering as well as a range of other engineering specialities, which

I had not anticipated prior to the interviews. In the context of the civil en-

gineering degree at Imperial aspects of both distinct disciplines are taught.

The interviews tended to focus on building rather than infrastructure en-

gineering, which could be a result of the selection of the participants by

myself, with my teaching and research covering structural and biomechan-

ical engineering, meaning that I have developed an interest in structure

and architectural form.

29

4.1 Knowledge

In the interview questions participants were encouraged to consider deep

and broad thinking as well as creativity. Thinking seemed to be taken as

equivalent to knowledge and understanding. Deep thinking was associated

with core knowledge and understanding, while broad thinking was asso-

ciated with more practical activities and group working. Creativity often

seems to be associated with broad thinking as opposed to deep thinking.

However most of the participants focused on what I have previously de-

scribed as informed creativity (Phillips, 2012), seeing both deep and broad

thinking contributing to a creative process.

Interviewees had various conceptions of the meaning of creativity, with

several commenting that engineering was by definition a creative activity.

The process of having ideas, or ideation had greater resonance:

I don’t find creativity a desperately helpful concept. I’m much

happier with the notion of ideation, which is how to have an

idea . . . so if you take the skill of having an idea, I know how

to have an idea, I think that’s a very important skill . . . an idea

is simply a mental response to a series of stimuli. [. . . ] Now,

if you are someone who has a preponderance of let’s say deep

thinking skills, and let’s say a lack of general knowledge, then

your ability to have ideas is quite constrained, more constrained

for example than in people who have a broad knowledge. Why?

Because they’re drawing on a broader set of potential stimuli

responses, and you can really see this in — top quality designers

for instance are notable eclectic personalities. (P04)

I think creativity, for me, creativity is a really delicate thing.

I think you can crush it. You can’t — you can’t entice it out

of people. [. . . ] you invite people to come forward with ideas.

It’s — ideas is a proxy for creativity, isn’t it? I think if you ask

people for ideas it seems easier than saying “Can you — can

you please be creative”, you know? (P05)

I’m looking for them [universities] to teach pure engineering that

can involve creativity because engineering is creative. That’s not

even a question, I find people spend far too long asking them-

selves that. It seems extraordinary. They create everything

. . . everything, so the notion that it’s not, it’s just, I think we’re

getting a little bit, or maybe we’re always a bit over excited

about the notions of status and celebrity. There’s an NCE cam-

paign about why don’t we have engineers on TV, this stuff is all

digression in my opinion. I don’t mind about any of this stuff,

30

I’m much more interested in we just do our profession well.

(P02)

Although knowledge in a manner that could be considered as a taxon-

omy was generally not touched upon during the interviews one participant

raised the concept of guild knowledge, seen as occupying the bottom two

layers of Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1956).

. . . if you look at Bloom’s taxonomy of knowledge, the lower two

levels are very definitive knowledge, can you recognise it, do you

know what it’s called? . . . “Oh, that’s what it does”. It’s easy

knowledge to acquire and it turns out to be critical in my view,

to the effective solution of engineering type problems. (P04)

The same participant described their initial experience of starting work

as a graduate:

I knew how to solve certain sorts of rather hard sums and pro-

gramming, and I could do various other things, but I didn’t

know, metaphorically speaking, the difference between a ham-

mer and a screwdriver. So I think that sort of knowledge turns

out to be very, very important and it served me extremely well.

(P04)

As well as commenting:

Don’t need to worry you guys at university because you don’t

need to show students what a bulldozer is, they can figure that

out in their own time. We’ve just got to put the information

resources there in a way that they use them, which allows you to

get on with the higher Bloom knowledge functions which relate

to the why, when and how to. (P04)

Relating these comments to the undergraduate degree at Imperial it is

easy to believe that the acquisition of guild knowledge represents a gap

in the education system between school and university level. It is not the

type of knowledge that is covered within the first and second year struc-

tural mechanics course for example, although will be touched on within the

design courses. It is knowledge that may be considered of too basic a level

to be discussed within the main curriculum of an undergraduate degree,

while at the same time being unfamiliar to those studying mathematics

or the pure sciences at school level. A very recent report by the Royal

Academy of Engineering (Lucas et al., 2014) highlights the failure of the

school curriculum to develop engineering habits of mind, many of which

can be seen to be echoed in this dissertation, or encourage thinking like an

31

engineer. Games such as Engineering Mastermind4 form part of an indus-

try response to provide guild knowledge outside of the main curriculum of

an undergraduate degree. The Constructionarium (Ahearn et al., 2005),

a week long site based experience undertaken by students at Imperial and

several other universities can also be considered as focused on acquiring

guild knowledge of the construction process. In my view the acquisition of

guild knowledge can be considered within the context of Kolb’s learning cy-

cle (Kolb, 1976) in combination with the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy

of knowledge (Bloom, 1956).

There was a tension between the responses of several of the other par-

ticipants, suggesting that an MEng undergraduate degree rarely provided

sufficient deep knowledge and understanding for them to consider appoint-

ing candidates at the time of graduation, although increasingly candidates

were identified through involvement with companies while completing their

undergraduate studies. This is discussed in more detail in Sections 4.4

and 4.7.

Several of the participants discussed the notion of ‘T’ or ‘multi-T’

shaped people as making for ideal engineers, where the vertical compo-

nent was seen as deep knowledge and the horizontal component was seen

as broad knowledge:

. . . so we have a sort of model of multi-T personalities, and we

think that the most successful engineers are those who have a

good breadth and at least one area of deep knowledge. And

there’s a very particular reason for that and it is this, that the

skill set or the thinking skill and the processes that are asso-

ciated with what we loosely call deep knowledge are different.

They require levels of concentration, levels of determination and

individual focus which are not characteristic of the other stuff

[. . . ] now those of us who have acquired, at one stage or an-

other, a degree of specialist knowledge, know what it means. It

doesn’t mean everything and it means considerably more than

nothing. (P04)

It comes back to the T-shaped person, because the engineering

is the deep expertise, let’s say. I think that’s fundamental.

(P05)

One the participants saw broad and deep learning as a parallel process,

with other participants discussing ‘T’ shaped people as having to develop

along both the horizontal and vertical components.

4www.engineeringmastermind.org

32

I think it’s essential that the design and delivery tools, so your

technical skills and your ability, your experience in delivering

keeps pace with your input to the development of conceptions.

In other words, you cannot have a career path where you only

develop concepts [. . . ] I think you have to kind of focus on

making sure one doesn’t get ahead of another. (P02)

In my experience specific learning models are rarely discussed either by

academics or industrialists in the context of engineering education. The

notion of a T-shaped person with both breadth and depth of knowledge is

on abrupt examination pictorially similar to the learning model proposed

by Illeris (2003) (see Figure 1), although both breadth and depth relate

to the cognition dimension. In the explanation of the cognition, emotion

and environment dimensions, expanding out from the self, I believe Illeris’

learning model has the potential to be used in discussion between academics

and industrialists, in an adapted form perhaps based on the dimensions

presented in this dissertation, although direct mapping between these and

Illeris’ model is problematic. Kolb’s learning cycle is perhaps too simplistic,

with the full learning model perhaps both too complex and too formulated

or mechanistic to be used in such a manner.

Although the concept of T or multi-T shaped people was widely ac-

knowledged by the participants this does not seem to be something that

is explicitly reflected in learning model research, although it is commented

on in research on implementing educational policy (Rip, 2004). The no-

tions of T-shaped people and design thinking (Brown and Wyatt, 2010)

have emerged from presentations by and interviews with Tim Brown, the

Chief Executive Officer at IDEO5, an international design consultancy. In

describing T-shaped people there is a strong sense that the metaphors of

broad and deep may be extended to the skills and attitudes, as well as the

knowledge dimensions.

Although I have taken knowledge and thinking to be equivalent it must

be acknowledged that thinking, and in particular thinking like an engi-

neer, requires a wider array of attributes than knowledge alone. In the

subsequent sections on skills, attitudes and experience I have attempted to

highlight those attributes which were seen as crucial from the interviews.

4.2 Skills

The interviews revealed a large number of skills or behaviours that could

be considered as essential to the practice of engineering, beyond the a priori

concepts of broad and deep knowledge and creativity. These included the

5www.ideo.com/uk/

33

the abilities to communicate, collaborate, challenge, and convince.

4.2.1 Communication and collaboration

Collaboration and communication were listed as key skills by all of the

participants, with specific examples of their importance indicated:

. . . we tend to think of depth and breadth and you know, all of

this T-shaped people and that stuff, is something we talk about

then we have . . . [this] third element of creativity . . . is there a,

kind of fourth quality? . . . I can’t think of a better word than

collaborativeness. . . . to be creative and highly specialist or to

be creative and highly broad, you could still perhaps not be

collaborative . . . without that ability to share and communicate

it amongst. You’re not doing that much good. (P01)

I think collaboration is extremely important. The emphasis

I’d make is from the position of an informed stance on your

own discipline . . . I really sort of emphasise that because I’m

concerned, in the UK, that we might be letting that go slightly.

(P02)

. . . we have a whole series of different skills that we look at, from,

you know, knowledge skills and experience, thinking and deci-

sion making, planning and organising, communication. Team

working and leadership. Commercial awareness. Ability to

build relationships. We look at a spectrum of traits. (P05)

4.2.2 Challenge

The skill of challenging was seen both as the an ability to challenge yourself,

but also as an ability to challenge or interrogate others, making sure that

the optimal solution as opposed to one that was just good enough was

achieved. Distinctions were drawn between good and ordinary engineering

and between competency and excellence. It was frequently mentioned in

the context of leadership:

Some leaders just want to sort of whip up the enthusiasm, open

the door, stuff everyone in the room, tell everybody to sort of

work together and expect that it’s going to be okay. But actually

it does need to be something more interactive that that . . . so

if you’ve got a specialist . . . who’s been working in that field

for 25 years . . . you’ve got to be the person probing, you know,

“What is that? Why is that? Why is it like it? How could it be

different? Is that the only way to do it? Why have you made

34

those assumptions? Where have those ideas come from? Has

anyone else got any —?” You know, you’ve got to interrogate

all the time. (P05)

I think your agenda for a project becomes more ambitious be-

cause you said, “Well I’ve done that, so how do we make this

better?”. Because you can’t make it only as good as the last

project. So, “When can, how can we make this more interesting

for everybody and for us and better for the client?”. (P01)

Several of the participants were concerned that specialisation could be

seen as ‘taking the easy route’, thus not challenging oneself to expand the

range of influences that you were exposed to:

Human beings, even broad thinkers, have a tendency to allow

themselves to become specialists. You know, society tends to

sort of segregate into silos of expertise, and even within those

silos, when you’ve got a broad thinking, they, they just permit

themselves to get blinkered and they, — I think you get reward,

society rewards specialism. The better you become at a thing,

the more responsibility, the higher your grade, the more your

money. The bigger and more exciting projects you work on.

You know, you have more responsibility in meetings. It feels

good, you’re making progress. (P05)

There was discord with one of the participants suggesting that gradu-

ates were often focused on ‘grabbing experiences’ (P03) that were seen as

increasing their employability and fulfilling the criteria of obtaining char-

tered status, changing the culture of an organisation. All participants ex-

pressed concern that a generalist approach from graduates could be symp-

tomatic of a lack of deeper knowledge and understanding, a failure to

overcome a knowledge barrier:

Creativity can shine out of people when they interview. But

then they might also be a bit flaky, you know, technically flaky

. . . you should have a mix, and if you homogenise it too much,

that’s probably not healthy. (P05)

I consider that creativity in engineering only comes from the

sufficient technical prowess and then curiosity. So it’s a combi-

nation, for me, of can you deliver on what you say you’ve con-

ceived because if not that’s fine, but then you’re in the realm of

a more, call it, theoretical designer . . . if you can’t find a way of

delivering on what you’re drawing, it doesn’t invalidate it, but

it isn’t engineering, for me. And the particular point I would

35

emphasise is that leads me to be keen in education, to make sure

people stay focused on their technical skills. I see a big variation

of that in the UK. I see some people who move off quickly into,

what I call, management decisions, which kind of masquerade

as creativity, but I think are more logical thinking. (P02)

We became concerned that we were slightly too dull so we start-

ed looking for people who fronted up with a sort of like a, I don’t

know, like a quirky or interesting or extreme personalities. That

was pretty much an unmitigated disaster because the sort of

people we were seeing were much better at talking about them-

selves and their dreams than they were actually about being

engineers. And so what we would find is we’d get them in and

it was just very hard to use them, to deploy them, get a day’s

work out of them or get them through the process. (P04)

4.2.3 Convince

The skill of convincing can be considered as combining the other three

skills. At the leadership level it can be seen as convincing the client that

your firm is the one that should be awarded the project. At the graduate

level it can be seen as convincing the team that your part of the project is

optimal:

What characterises a lot of the work we do is you, you don’t

win them unless you can convince someone that you’re going to

be able to deliver them . . . it tends to be that you’re up against

international gangs of people who are notable for their track

record and their ability to inspire a certain level of confidence

in the choice maker, the client, who decides to give you the job

or not. (P04)

. . . it’s something I try and tell all of the people when I talk

to them in practice, an important part of your job is to have a

vision for the project that you are working on, set a goal, what is

it you want to achieve from the project, even if you haven’t got

ultimate guiding power as an overarching leader, perhaps you’re

leading a piece. You need to, leaders need to have agendas: they

need to have something they want to achieve, not just drift with

the flow. That’s — I think that’s one of the important points for

leaders, they’re at the front, they’re showing the way and you

can’t show the way unless you have an idea of what the way is.

So I try and encourage everyone to have that view, so when you

join a project what is it that you want to achieve? (P01)

36

4.3 Attitudes

The interviews revealed a number of attitudes, characteristics or traits,

which could be considered as implicit rather than explicit skills, related to

how an individual works within a social and society setting, in particular

when developing relationships within a teams as well as with collaborators

from other groups. In describing them as attitudes I am not suggesting

that they cannot be developed, but that for some people they may repre-

sent a natural way of working, while for others time must be put aside to

develop them. The attitudes of curiosity, courage, respect and reflection

were commented on across all of the interviews.

4.3.1 Curiosity

Curiosity emerged as the characteristic or attitude most looked for in en-

gineering graduates:

What you need to do is keep looking, keep researching your

area, keep investigating, keep learning things. Stay open, and

then you will pick those things up, but the notion of engineering

intuition, as I say, in my view is engineering knowledge, and then

time and curiosity. (P02)

I think inherently they are, they are curious. I mean they

wouldn’t be engineers if they weren’t curious and trying to un-

derstand things and how things work and I mean, it’s, it’s some-

thing that I think you’re challenging, the conventional wisdom

as well as using experience of two rivalling systems, and out

of it comes a more unusual, although the better way of doing

things. (P03)

There is quite an interesting educational challenge in getting

people to be curious as well, you know, if they’re not already cu-

rious, how are you going to make them more curious? [. . . ] And

there is something about creating a mental framework where it’s

understood or at least it’s felt that when you behave curiously

good things happen. (P04)

So, I think you want somebody who’s got good physics, good

maths, a good sort of scientific mind, but you want a problem

solver, and you want a broad thinker, and you want somebody

who can — who has curiosity. So I do think that the broader,

softer skills are really important. (P05)

37

4.3.2 Courage

Courage can be seen along with challenge as the difference between ordi-

nary and good engineering, or between competence and excellence. Engi-

neers are necessarily focused on ensuring the safety and efficacy of anything

that they are responsible for designing. Hence there is a tension between

safety and risk in design. There is a sense that society does not expect engi-

neers to take risk. In my view society can be overly critical when mistakes

are considered to have been made.

. . . you have to have a, kind of, a little bit of courage and a little

bit of experience I suppose and quite a lot of, “I want it to work,

because I think this is the right, this is going to be what this

building needs” . . . I mean we often call that courage. (P01)

There was a sense that good engineers had the courage to go against

consensus:

. . . leaders need to have agendas, they need to have something

they want to achieve, not just drift with, with the flow.

(P01)

. . . try and identify as much of the problem as possible, in order

to come up with the best solution to as much of the problem.

So the more people you can consult with — but you also can’t

get consensus. (P05)

4.3.3 Respect

Respect was seen in the context of collaborating with those outside your

own discipline. In combination with courage it was often referred to in the

context of working with architects. In one of the subsets of questions I

asked ‘What do you think is the difference between an engineering (leader)

and an architect?’ with the responses relevant in my view to all engineers,

whether they are involved in leadership or not, with all participants having

an engineering education. Respect in the context of engineering leadership

is discussed further in Section 4.5.

In commenting on how discipline specific experts collaborate it is clear

that each needs to respect the process that the other has been through to

acquire their expertise, but also have the courage to challenge them:

. . . which means I both respect people who’ve been through the

process, but I also understand it doesn’t mean everything.

(P04)

38

The combination of respect and courage allowed for effective collabo-

ration between engineers and architects, recognising the discipline specific

expertise each bought to the table. In considering distinctions between

engineers and architects these were seen as small but significant, relating

to the education of each discipline.

I see them as distinct, and I am entirely — that makes it sound

more certain than it’s supposed to. I’m happy with that dis-

tinction. I think, it is interesting that I take the position of

my discipline. What is the structural response to this question?

So then I’ve informed the debate because I’ve bought some in-

formation to it. [. . . ] The really exciting bit is when you say,

“But you could do this, oh that’s amazing”. A when you work

with people from other disciplines, who can bounce off that, and

they say “Oh that’s very interesting. Well if we can do that, why

don’t we do this?”. In other words, they come back with anoth-

er idea, so it’s not, “Oh well that’s all about the engineering”.

They bounce off it, they come back with another idea, you chew

that around. (P02)

One participant commented on the value that both disciplines bought

to the engineering design process:

I so value the push from the architect on me to try harder or

the push from the architect to see something that “I haven’t

seen”, an opportunity, so that I honestly believe that architects

have made my engineering better and the end results better,

but I also think that an architect who listens to an engineer can

also recognise, does recognise that they are going to get a better

result. (P01)

Commenting on how advances in computational modelling allowed en-

gineers to have an increasing role in building design:

. . . engineers are all getting better at putting numbers to what

architects used to do by, “It worked last time so it will work

now”. We are now able to say, “Well, actually you can optimise

performance”. [Previously] there weren’t the tools available to

allow us to look at the more interactive part of human beings

with the building and we weren’t able to assess how happy peo-

ple would be in the building. [. . . ] We can now put numbers and

evidence against what used to be the well, the architecture used

to, the architect used to say, “Well, I’ve done this before, my in-

telligence and experience tells me this will work, trust me”. We

39

can now say as engineers, “We can model it and we can improve

it”, and we can actually say, you know, “there are better ways of

doing it”. So the engineer starts to occupy or starts to optimise

what used to be, what the architect used to be relied upon to

do. [. . . ] is that a threat to architects? I mean I’m not sure

because I think architects are intelligent people and they’ve had

a prejudice against getting involved in numbers, but through

computers, numbers, you don’t touch numbers, you touch com-

puter models. (P01)

Several of the participants saw the distinctions as small but important,

bringing diversity to the design process, and highlighted problems that

could occur when there was a lack of distinction.

[The difference], probably a philosophical perspective, so real-

ly, so really not much, actually. It’s paper thin these days.

There is a difference and I think it is probably a perspective. So

architects might be trying to answer a slightly different set of

questions. [. . . ] the engineer is, is obviously answering questions

of robustness, and durability, and efficiency, and effectiveness.

The architect might be answering questions of cultural fit, you

know, impact. You know, visual impact on the environment.

Behavioural impact on the people in the building. But I think

there’s, you know, the answers to both of those questions over-

lap, a really good — you know, the best architects are better

than some of the engineers I know. And some of the engineers I

know are better than a lot of the — than some of the architects,

I should say.

[. . . ]

I don’t know what makes that perspective . . . I think [it] some-

how comes through their education . . . one lot doing a load of

maths and physics, and the other lot doing a lot of, you know,

philosophy and art historical study . . . But then, you know, as

you go through your career, I think, I think you educate yourself

back again.

[. . . ]

some of the worst projects I’ve done are where the architects

are so weak, they just look to the engineer for the solution, and

then they, quite literally, execute whatever the engineering ideas

are. (P05)

As far as I’m concerned, architecture is a subset of engineer-

ing. Where engineering, certainly engineering is understood as

40

modifying the physical world for the use and benefit of all, then

architecture . . . they are essentially going through an identical

process . . . what differentiates us in terms of that process is the

knowledge domains we exercise it on and the particular tech-

niques we adopt. [. . . ] I expect them to be rather better at

making judgements of a subjective nature about aesthetic mer-

its or the way that people will experience space . . . in buildings

the architect is cast as the lead designer traditionally, in infras-

tructure the engineer is cast as the lead designer.

[. . . ]

my experience is actually the most ineffective teams in the early

ideation phase, you couldn’t tell who was the architect and who

was the engineer or indeed who was the client. (P04)

One participant highlighted an additional role in modern construction,

that of the project manager, often appointed by the client, whose motiva-

tion and attitudes could be different from those of the lead engineer and

lead architect:

A third element in the leadership of big projects, and so you,

you know, you get a [contractor] or somebody coming in, and

in many ways it’s devalued the role of the architect, and the

engineer, because he’s sitting there saying, “Well, you know, I

want it done this way”. Or the architect’s saying, “I want it done

this way”. And, the project manager is kind of saying, “Well,

you know, you do realise if you paint it this colour, it’s going to

be cheaper”. (Laughter) And so, you know, some decisions can

be taken away from engineer and architect, on the basis that,

you’ve got this project manager in the role. Cheaper or quicker

or whatever, it’s, you know it’s, because, he again has got some

different, a different set of values . . . a different agenda, because

you know, he’s perhaps on a bonus if he delivers the project on

time and on budget. (P03)

In the context of the Group Design Projects, those participants who

have been involved with them recalled concerns regarding the simplistic

way in which architecture was viewed as a discipline within the projects,

with students expected to take on the roles of engineers and architects. I

think this illustrates the danger of suggesting to engineering students that

they should see themselves as being able to do everything, rather than

having an appreciation of other disciplines. It has made me consider ways

in which good architectural collaboration and communication can be em-

bedded within the projects, something also discussed by the participants:

41

I remember when I was a young engineer, it was recognised

by some of the leaders then, that the young engineers weren’t

ever given the opportunity to sit there and collaborate with

architects, to see what could happen. [. . . ] I made this comment

to you about, you know, the design course, would be really good

to collaborate on some of the projects with some architectural

schools, to get the engineers to bring that aspect out. Because,

you know some of the design projects really require that artistic

creativity, that perhaps an architect can bring. (P03)

That the notion of understanding everybody’s process, which is

good, might eclipse the fact that you really should be an expert

in yours, and you should keep worrying yourself about whether

you are. In other words, it’s not a position of security.

[. . . ]

I have to say that one of the things I noticed in the third year

projects that the architectural position, design position, was

incredibly basic. I mean, really, really, really, really basic . . . I

actually felt that the people supervising them just should have

been more clear that that just wasn’t acceptable. [. . . ] You

should at least get past that because if you go into work with

that, you know, you’re really very early. So I think even a little

bit of that would move people past that stage. (P02)

I should be clear that these comments are about improving the process

and should not be seen as detracting from what the students achieve on the

Group Design Projects, but I think it emphasises the need for academics

and industrialists to have respect for other disciplines and to establish

ways of working with those from other disciplines. In the context of sig-

nificance networks (Roxa and Matensson, 2009) and learning and teaching

regimes (Fanghanel, 2009) this is not something that will happen outside

of pockets of excellence without support across multiple levels of both aca-

demic and industrial organisations.

4.3.4 Reflection

Reflection in particular may be considered as both an attitude and a skill.

It was frequently mentioned in the context of leadership but also in the

context of career trajectories. Reflection is not something that seems to be

encouraged as part of most courses on the undergraduate degree, although

I think it is an attitude that is beneficial, either after a particular stage of

a process, or at the end of a process. It was evident from the interviews

that the participants critically reflect on each project to see if improvement

42

could be made and if changes could be adopted for similar projects in the

future:

So when you build something, you finish it, everybody’s, you

know, it’s always like, “Oh, isn’t it lovely? Isn’t it great? Isn’t

it —?”. You know, that’s fine, have a few minutes of that, but

really, what you need to be doing is getting down to, is it good

enough? Could it have been better? What didn’t work out so

well? What are the — you know, that’s a crucial part of it.

And then, you know, was the process any good? Did — could

we have done the process better? How would we do the process

differently next time? I think those questions are fundamental.

(P05)

It can be seen from the quote that there is reflection on the outcome

but also on the process, suggesting double loop learning as proposed by

Argyris (Argyris, 1999, ch 3). In the context of the individual, van Wo-

erkom et al. (2002) discuss critical reflective behaviour. I believe we should

encourage our students to adopt this behaviour although the current sys-

tem of assessment does not provide sufficient opportunity to do this. In

the majority of courses students sit examinations, either at the end of the

course or the end of the year, with little opportunity to reflect on the

outcome of their examinations (the marks) or their own revision process.

While continuous assessment on the Group Design Projects provides some

opportunity for reflection there is no formal process of allowing students

to reflect on what changes they might make if faced with a similar project

in the future.

Several of the participants described the cultures of their companies.

The culture of a company is most clearly represented in attitudes displayed

by its leaders and staff. This is something clearly put forward in Ove

Arup’s Key Speech (1970) which may loosely be interpreted as project,

people, planet, where project relates to ensuring the optimal project for

the client, people relates to ensuring that a companies staff are motivated

and essentially happy in their work, and planet relates to the environmental

consequences of the project. Ethical considerations can be considered to

be embedded within the culture of a company which is itself developed by

its leaders, discussed further in Section 4.5.

4.4 Experience

There has been a renewed interest in civil engineering education at Imperi-

al in practical experience alongside core understanding, with the inclusion

of laboratories and demonstrations in subjects such as structural mechan-

43

ics, fluid mechanics and geotechnics. This may reflect a gradual shifting

between the scholar academic and the social efficiency curriculum ideolo-

gies Schiro (2008) as part of what can be seen as a cyclical process, with

some of these activities being reintroduced having been lost from the cur-

riculum for a number of years. In saying this I do not mean to suggest

that the curriculum is not specific to the discipline of civil engineering, but

rather that there is an increased emphasis on application of knowledge to

promote understanding.

In analysing the interviews several of the participants commented that

much of what much of what could be described as the experience of being

an engineer was difficult to learn in any other setting than the workplace,

discussed further in Section 4.7. The value of guild knowledge was recog-

nised, with activities such as the Constructionarium providing experience

leading to this.

Activities with the potential to elucidate the engineering design process

to students, described as ‘design what you build’ activities were seen to

have particular value by one of the participants:

Perhaps the particular notion is that you design what you built,

and maybe we’re getting very specific here, but we’ve had peo-

ple come and interview for us, where they’ve been involved in

things, where they’ve made a miniature version of a bridge or a

miniature version of a structure, that’s fine. They seem to have

taken on, “This is the miniature structure we had to make,

and they showed us the structure, and we made it”. And I

can, the little, I haven’t had much to do with education, and

that’s not particularly deliberate, but I found sometimes there’s

an attitude of, “There’s an answer and we’re going to write it

down, and then we’ll have written down the answer”. And per-

haps they’re, if there is something about the construction in the

curriculum, I would be interested in people actually designing

something. So first of all, everybody sees there’s lots of different

answers to things, and secondly that they’ll see the results, if

they get the design wrong. (P02)

The same participant recognised that students may lack the knowledge

and skills to carry out design:

I’d rather they designed something, but I would, somebody

could say, “Yeah, but they’ve got to learn something first”.

(P02)

Going on to describe a project with an open brief that he had seen

presented a conference he commented:

44

He had set people a very open ended challenge of, “You’ve got

to make a timing device . . . I’m not going to tell you anything

about it, other than it’s got to rack up six chimes and then start

again”, or something, so it’s a timer. And that was fascinating,

so then I’m going to the other extreme of just open it right up,

there’s no right answer. (P02)

In the third year structural mechanics course at Imperial students get

to design and build an aluminium beam and test it to failure (make and

break). In the context of design and build this is a valuable exercise.

However, alongside an introductory challenge in the first year to design

and make the tallest possible tower out of a limited amount of newspaper

and sticky tape, it is one of very few opportunities to design what you

build. It is interesting to consider how the concept could be incorporated

into other courses on the undergraduate degree alongside the question of

how engineering undergraduates might experience engineering within an

industrial context prior to graduation. It also raises an issue in how we as

academics encourage students towards engineering thinking. While there

is a focus on problem solving this is frequently done after the academic has

formulated the problem, often providing no more and no less information

than is required to solve the problem. Hence we hide a large of amount of

the process from the students. It is interesting to consider how much the

problem definition part of the process should and could be opened up at

different stages of the degree.

4.5 Leadership

In considering leadership the participants were in general agreement that an

undergraduate degree should focus on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes

discussed, with a range of views on the experiences that might be most

beneficial, rather than focus on the development of specific leadership skills.

However there was an acknowledgement that an awareness of leadership

skills would be beneficial, alongside an awareness of a number of stages

that an engineering career trajectory might take.

Two of the participants identified specific stages they felt their careers

had gone through, with one seeing these as representing a different focus

over successive ten year periods:

At different times, as you progress through your career, there’s

different sorts of leadership things that are needed. From the

early days, I think you need to be able to answer for your tech-

nical specialism, and get it right. You know, to bring the best,

expertise to the client and the design process, and you repre-

45

sent, you know, I’ve represented the mechanical engineer. So

when you’re at the table, your leadership has to be technically

excellent and right in those meetings, and then as you progress,

and you might have a broader leadership role, you have to not

only do that but also make sure that you’re drawing out from

the other engineering disciplines, the best of what they’ve got,

bringing them to the table at the right time. And then, as you

progress a bit further, you might then be in a greater leader-

ship role, where you’re more proactively with the people who

are shaping the project. So the client, the lead architect, the

funders, the investors, whoever they may be, and you’re repre-

senting the technical side but you’re trying to strategically steer

the project to a successful conclusion. So you’re trying to fore-

cast ahead, to make decisions. I suppose at the position I’m in

now, is where you’re leading teams of these sorts of people, and

you’re trying to mentor and coach them to have that, proactive

and forward looking approach to their projects. (P05)

. . . in the journey through an engineering career, I think you can

kind of map it out in ten year chunks really. And at different

stages these skills have different significance. So in the first ten

years I think very much you’re in the business of getting yourself

an education. And really I’ve never met a genius engineer at

22 who I would trust to do much actually. Certainly not much

in the real world, but I don’t think probably you’re able to see

what you’ve got until you’re in your late 20s or early 30s. And

really that period of your life is about developing a really pro-

found understanding of the way stuff is done. And that could be

a blend of technical, economic, social, political. So you’re build-

ing your knowledge and understanding and your knowledge of

how to do things. So in the first part of my career I’d say that I

was really testing my brain against technical challenges in some

depth. I mean I would spend, in those days, I mean I might

spend six months working on what looks like now a relatively

tiny part of a project, you know. And in great depth and know-

ing a lot about it. But it was training me to understand how

things work and go together. So the first part of my career I

would say was not so full of leading people or running teams, it

was much more about developing and understanding a knowl-

edge of the way the engineering world worked with a big focus,

in my case, on the practical and the technical. [. . . ] I learnt a

lot then about economic appraisal, risk assessment, risk anal-

46

ysis modelling, the role of analytical techniques. An emerging

sense that not all questions had singular answers and that not

all choices were objective in character and that actually there

was a lot more to it than that.

The second ten years in mapping out a professional career if

you’re any good, by the time you’re 30 people will start giving

you chances to exercise yourself on projects, and in my case

I was given a very significant role on a big project, And my

focus shifted very much from me and my personal performance

to how the hell do I get 30 people to perform, get along, be

happy? So I think the next ten years my focus was really on

getting good at getting along with people really. Of course there

are no clear boundaries between these things but if you were to

look at the dominant skill that was helping me in my 20s, it

wasn’t the same. In my 30s it was much more about an ability

to communicate, to think clearly at a more strategic level and

to get people to participant, perform and so on.

As I sit in the middle of my 40s, really my role is moved out

of the day to day business of running teams and getting per-

formance out of projects. It’s much more about the strategic

direction of the enterprise. Understanding trends in the market-

place, networking outside the tight confines of my organisation

into a broader network, positioning the organisation and our

journey through it. And so it involves broadening of thought

and attitudes and a different sort of interaction with other peo-

ple where it’s less about telling people what they need to do or

getting them to see what they need to do, and it’s more about

generating shared attitudes and shuffling, because the people I

deal with are not people I can give instruction to. At the very

best we can hope for a good lunch.

I imagine as I go on it will change again. (P04)

In both of these quotes as well as others the role of the leader as someone

who is able critically reflect and then implement a strategy is emphasised.

There was a sense of deliberate transformation of identities (Tennant, 2006,

ch 4). In contrast to the notion of communities of practice (Lave and

Wenger, 2003) there is a sense of networks expanding through the different

stages of leadership, starting from being comfortable within a culture, mov-

ing to influencing the culture of a company, and then extending the culture

of a company to an external network. Another participant talked about

gaining a societal status. Ove Arup’s Key Speech (1970) describes the

concept of ‘total architecture’ which seems to be indicative of the culture

47

that the leaders I interviewed were involved in creating and maintaining,

with the concept extending to honourable dealing with clients; honest,

consistent and empathetic dealings with staff; as well as a sense of ethical

integrity. As one of the participants commented:

I think engineers have the opportunity to be really influential

with our clients. Really, really influential, if we’re good enough

and we take the opportunity at the right moment. But if we just

take a brief and get on with it, the moment’s lost, you know.

Our ability to solve more problems than just what the client is

asking for. So when you make an intervention, an engineering

intervention, there are all sorts of things you can also solve with

that, and there are also sorts of things that you shouldn’t do

with that thing. So it’s, you know, as well as honourable deal-

ings and all that. I don’t mean to dismiss it, it’s fundamental.

You’ve got to have those kinds of ethics, but it is — what more

for society could you be doing? Sounds high faluting, and quite

grand, but actually why not, right? I mean, we’re making, you

know, we’re influencing nature in such a huge way. If we don’t

do it, you know — who will? (P05)

It came through in the interviews that technical excellence was a crucial

attribute in early career leadership, while in order to continue to progress

as a leader you need to consciously broaden your influences in order to

avoid remaining as a specialist, although it was acknowledged that many

specialists were happy in their positions.

. . . there are exciting paths for a structural engineer to become a

structural engineering specialist, and you know, it’s incredibly

rewarding as well, as in, you know, make no bones about it,

people who consider themselves to be the structural expert have,

are some of the happiest folk that we’ve got. You know, they

absolutely love it, but there is a point in their career where their

responsibility tops out and they perform the same role on lots of

projects, and will for many years, you know, ten, twenty years,

be at that level. (P05)

A critical skill in engineering leadership, and one that was looked out

for in engineering graduates was the assimilation of outside influences into

the engineering discipline. I see this as learning at a higher level than

that implied in Illeris’ learning model as it relates to the assimilation of

information and concepts outside of the domain or discipline that you are

based within. It could be considered as a gradual form of transformative

learning.

48

I do think that over the last sort of ten years, maybe, ten or

fifteen years, I’ve learnt as much if not more about my discipline

from non-engineering sources . . . engineering leaders should look

to non-engineering sources for inspiration, and reflection on, on

their discipline and their goals and how they go about their

work. (P05)

. . . you go to visit other people’s bridges, you go and look at

art shows, you read biographies. I mean, in short you read

biographies about Brunel, but you also read biographies about

anybody else you want to, Karl Marx. (P02)

If you are talking about graduates, they’ve already had, you

know sixteen to eighteen period at school when they could have

been head of orchestra, they could have gone round the world,

they could have, you know, written a book, they could have

done so many things these days and at university what they’ve

got up to in addition to the course. And then in a way, how

they’ve, how they perceive what they’ve learnt and often they’ve

got a bit of work experience, sometimes here which was shown

with some of them. So there’s a lot, in the end it’s how they

see the world, and how they’ve grabbed experience and used

that experience, learnt from that experience, I suppose have an

agenda. (P01)

There is a sense that graduates must been seen to be self-motivated

and self-aware, capable of independent thinking. The same participant

comments:

I have a sneaky suspicion we look for team leaders. That means,

you know, because in some respects they stand out, they im-

press, they have more to say, they probably have a history of

quite impressive stuff . . . so there is a danger than we tend to fo-

cus on getting in leaders and, therefore, don’t get enough team

players, you know, too many soloists and not enough orchestra.

But I think we’ve learnt, I’m not sure it’s been absorbed, but

I think it’s always a mistake to compromise. I think you have

to get the very best people you can find and then find ways of

them intelligently working how to get the best from each other.

So if by a team player we are looking for someone who is sub-

servient and not too creative and expects to be told what to do

or just follow the team, then I suspect we don’t really, that’s

not something we value so highly. (P01)

49

One phrase that was repeated in the interviews was the notion that

future leaders were those who were able to ‘front up’ in meetings with

clients and architects. They were able to bring something to the table, a

viewpoint based on their expertise and experience.

Several of the participants remembered being inspired during their early

careers, and it was clear that this had influenced their development towards

leadership positions, often related to being given responsibility and seeing

their leaders or mentors prepared to take risks in order to achieve the

optimal or desired outcome, a sense of excellence as opposed to competence,

good engineering as opposed to ordinary engineering.

One participant provided the analogy of building a sports team, with

an emphasis on diversity :

I mean the analogy might be putting a football team together,

or a rugby team or cricket team, or you know, a team sport

activity. How you select your team and your selection of your

captain. Now, typically an organisation cannot work with, or

a football team can’t work with a team full of goalkeepers or

a team full of centre forwards. You have to have a range of

skills in order for the whole team to function, and the same, it’s

exactly the same within an engineering organisation. (P03)

This was something that was echoed in several of the other interviews,

often relating to the ideation phase of a project. Although the participants

were clear that they were not looking for specific personality types, they

were in general looking for the diversity provided by individual graduate’s

interests and experiences beyond their degree courses.

Across the interviews four different types of leadership were identified,

which could be seen as changing in their significance at different stages of

an individual’s career trajectory. These were technical leadership, taking

responsibility for an area of technical expertise; design leadership, taking

responsibility for part or the whole of the engineering design process, dis-

cussed further in Section 4.6; business leadership, taking responsibility for

the financial as well as engineering success of a project or collection of

projects; and social leadership, taking responsibility for the development

of the culture of an organisation.

It emerged from the interviews that there was a clear distinction be-

tween the notion of leadership and the person nominated as being in charge.

There was a sense that engineers were best led by other engineers who

would have been through similar experiences and overcome similar knowl-

edge barriers.

This is a domain where your ability to understand the way the

physical world works, to use the intellectual tools and techniques

50

of engineers is very highly valued and people simply will not

recognise you, even if you’re in charge. And I know of many large

organisations where the staff will talk about the accountant who

is in charge, very dismissively, and hark back to the era when

the person in charge was an engineer of note, who had achieved

in things that they thought were valuable. So I think that if

you were to take the general concept of leadership as applied to

groups of people or organisations, and then to contextualise it

within engineering terms, probably the most significant flavour

that comes out of that is that engineers tend to have a strong

sense of importance of understanding the physical work, making

stuff, doing stuff that looks like engineering. And they expect of

their leaders, as a base requirement, a high level of competence

in that. (P04)

4.6 Engineering design process

It is evident that design and in particular engineering design must be con-

sidered as a process conducted by teams or groups of engineers, all with

particular knowledge, skills, attitudes and experience sets. However this

process often seems to be forgotten in the academic setting, with individu-

al courses developed and delivered largely by individuals or small groups,

generally focused on a knowledge curriculum. While it is clear from the

interviews that the concepts of deep and broad knowledge or thinking are

of use, the knowledge domain alone is not capable of describing the de-

velopment of engineering thinking. It seems sensible therefore to consider

using an engineering design process framework to assess what aspects of

the framework are addressed as part of an undergraduate civil engineering

degree course.

One participant had a well developed idea of the engineering design

process in this respect:

I understand engineering to involve the exercise of certain core

processes. The process of ideation, testing, judgement, commu-

nication put together in some sort of programmatic form in a

project. And what we’re doing as educators is we’re helping

people to develop core skills that allow them to occupy that.

My critique of the current education system is that, in that

model what we do is we over focus on testing. So most of what

we teach people is how to test certain things, how to establish

whether the stress that exists is permissible stresses. What we

don’t focus nearly so much on or to nearly such good effect is

51

the process of ideation and judgement, nor do we really work

on the question of attitudinal behaviours at all. (P04)

Another participant drew attention to the iterative nature of the engi-

neering design process:

I mean the number of loops we go through, I think people don’t

realise just how many loops you go through, where they say,

“Well I had this idea”. Then you sketch it, you send it over. We

now simply take a picture on our phones, and send it to some-

body, they pick it up, they sketch something on their, whatever,

piece of paper, send it back and the endless process is very in-

teresting. (P02)

Based on my analysis of the interviews as well as other sources and

experience, some of which are presented in this dissertation, I have drawn

up an interpretation of the engineering design process, shown in Figure 3

which I present as part of the Group Design Projects.

Define Ideate

Quantitative

judgement

Make

Qualitative

judgement

Convince

Figure 3: Interpretation of the Engineering Design Process

This interpretation breaks the engineering design process into distinct

stages of: define associated with problem definition; ideate associated with

the process of generating ideas; an iterative development stage associated

with quantitative judgement and qualitative judgement ; convince associat-

ed with convincing yourself, your team, your company and your client that

your solution is the optimal one; make which is associated with the final

stage of construction. Double headed connections are shown between each

of the stages as design cannot be viewed as a linear process, with transitions

52

occurring forwards and backwards between each of the stages. Addition-

al connections are shown between quantitative and qualitative judgement,

and ideate and convince as these processes are interpreted as occurring

in parallel, while the development stage is shown as iterative in nature.

Dash-dot connections indicate opportunities within the process for critical

reflection. Within this interpretation there is a sense of entering liminal

space in the tensions between quantitative and qualitative judgement, and

ideation and convincing. With regards to the quantitative — qualitative

tension the development of these processes in parallel is viewed as a critical

requirement of informed creativity. One of the participants described this

as modulation between different modes of thought:

So if you imagine that you can have many, many steps in a

process of thought, depth, or you can have lots and lots of things

you’re thinking about, breadth. Those things and the ability to

move between those modes of thought turn out to be, in my

view, essential to success in professional life. It’s not only the

ability to do those things, it’s the ability to know when to do

those things. And to be able to modulate your behaviour and

your thought process from one mode to another, depending on

the circumstances you find yourself in. (P04)

In speaking to students on the Group Design Projects they have found

it useful to be able to situate themselves within a process and acknowledge

that there are parts of the process that they are likely to be well versed

in (quantitative judgement), and parts that will challenge them (define,

ideate, qualitative judgement, convince). While the Group Design Projects

do not continue on to the make process I feel it is important that this is

included as it is an essential part of the overall engineering design process.

Following completion of the Group Design Projects this year, I plan to

discuss my interpretation either individually or in a focus group with the

interview participants, as well as asking the students to reflect on their

experiences of the Group Design Projects in the context of seeing them

as an engineering design process. Depending on the findings I believe it

could have application as a framework within which to position the current

civil engineering undergraduate curriculum, incorporating the additional

perspectives of skills, attitudes and experiences.

4.7 Education partnerships

In interpreting the interviews there was a consistent sense that current

university education did not provide graduates who were fully prepared to

enter the engineering profession, although it was acknowledged that signifi-

53

cant changes had taken place. For larger engineering consultancies in-house

training served to develop additional graduate attributes, while for small-

er engineering consultancies there were substantial risks associated with

appointing graduates outside of an elite group of ten universities. There

were a number of indicators that future leaders could be accommodated

as outliers within large engineering consultancies, but had the potential

at graduate level to cause disruption within smaller consultancies. This

finding runs contra to what I believe many undergraduate students believe

and are advised.

There was discomfort with the present separation between engineering

education and engineering practice. As one participant commented:

. . . for very understandable historic reasons we are part of the

same profession separated by a gulf of misunderstanding and

misaligned career objectives. (P04)

Participants commented on both the useful roles that undergraduate

students could play within an organisation as well as acknowledging that

few graduates from their first degree could immediately take on the re-

sponsibilities of a professional engineer.

So I used to accept things (laughter) and now I’m starting to

think, you know, “What are universities all about” because

there is a bit of me . . . that thinks you don’t need to send a

young person of eighteen to university for four years. It’s just,

it’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of their time and it’s a waste

of now their money [. . . ] So you then say, “Well some of you

are going to stay on for another four years or so and do a PhD

because that’s what we do and that’s how we get our money

and that’s going to make you a better person, apparently”. I

thought it was about getting a thesis but now I realise that’s

about making you a better person, that’s eight years gone. I

can’t imagine we couldn’t do a better job spending those eight

years differently, but I haven’t quite mapped out what differ-

ently looks like [. . . ] But isolating them [students] into that

environment when there is a big world that they could be ex-

periencing doesn’t seem logical and, so if, businesses put their

minds to it and in collaboration with other businesses which are

called universities, which have specialised in let’s say facilities

for, you know, allowing them to explore concrete, or facilities for

allowing them to do stuff that business, or one business couldn’t

have. Maybe facilities for experts to teach threads of knowledge

that relate to the work that they’re doing in the business. [. . . ]

54

You kind of wonder whether there isn’t a completely different,

kind of, model which is, which is what comes about between a

very proper partnership between an academic, a training busi-

ness and a delivering business. (P01)

Were you to make the course substantially, not substantially

longer, but longer, five years. You may have a year out, and

not earning any money, but getting some experience, and then

going back for two years or whatever. And then at the end of

your examinations you qualify as a chartered engineer . . . so you

come out, you know, as a young chartered engineer. It may not

be perfect but then an architect coming out . . . isn’t perfect or

a, a guy coming out with a medical degree. You know, he’s still

very much on probation. [. . . ] Suddenly it becomes a much

more dominant profession, in the sense that people see, “Gosh,

he’s done his six years or five years” . . . and the Europeans do

it that way. (P03)

. . . there’s a little, I say a little gang, there’s a gang of some

very serious people in industry with no academics around the

table, sitting and having this conversation and saying, you know,

“Let’s give them a brief. Let’s give the educationalists [educa-

tors] a brief”. At the moment we are not as an industry giving

them a clear brief, we’re basically just whinging and they’re

just defending and so we’re getting nowhere with this. On this

particular theme of design, let us turn round and say, “This is

what we want. We will help you do this in the following ways.

If you don’t do it we’ll simply do it ourselves and so you’ll miss

a trick”. (P04)

The concept of education partnerships between academia and industry

emerged as a potential solution to the current dilemma. These would need

to be somewhat more than the industrial advisory boards which already

exist at many universities, which in my experience meet once a year or

every few months and achieve little outside of those meetings. Instead

representatives of academia and industry are required to become embedded

within each other’s organisational domains, to allow students to effectively

transition between the two. This dissertation does not seek to provide the

details of such a process, but rather to highlight the formation of education

partnerships as a future scenario, that engineering consultancies, research

intensive universities and the engineering institutions should give, and in

some pockets of excellence have given, active consideration to.

55

4.8 MBTI data analysis

Analysis of MBTI data collected from students prior to commencing the

Group Design Projects is presented in order to assess if any trends can

be identified and whether any useful comparisons can be made between

the student cohort at Imperial compared to data collected at other insti-

tutions (Shen et al., 2007). As discussed in Section 3.3 the data presented

is based on just four questions. MBTI questionnaires have been found to

have inconsistent repeatability rates, with the indicator varying over time

as individuals acquire further knowledge, skills, attitudes and experiences.

Table 1 shows the MBTI distribution for students taking part in the

Group Design Projects each year from 2011 to 2014. Table 2 shows the

means and medians for each of the MBTI categories on a normalised scale.

Table 3 shows the percentage split between each of the MBTI categories,

as well as the number of standard deviations (SD) away from the mean.

Table 1: Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) distributions for students takingpart in the Group Design Projects

MBTI 2011 (%) 2012 (%) 2013 (%) 2014 (%) Mean (%)(n=90) (n=108) (n=69) (n=101) (n=368)

ESTJ 37.8 32.4 42.0 33.7 36.4ESTP 1.1 0.9 4.4 5.9 3.1ESFJ 5.6 9.3 4.4 5.9 6.3ESFP 4.4 3.7 2.9 2.0 3.3ENTJ 11.1 6.4 8.7 5.0 7.8ENTP 3.3 3.7 4.4 1.0 3.1ENFJ 3.3 6.4 2.9 5.0 4.4ENFP 3.3 1.9 2.9 5.0 3.3ISTJ 16.7 16.7 14.5 17.8 16.4ISTP 0 1.9 0 2.0 1.0ISFJ 1.1 5.6 7.3 1.0 3.7ISFP 0 0 0 3.0 0.7INTJ 5.6 2.8 1.5 5.0 3.7INTP 2.2 2.8 0 4.0 2.2INFJ 1.1 4.6 2.9 1.0 2.4INFP 3.3 0.9 1.5 3.0 2.2

Looking at Table 1 it can be seen that the ESTJ and ISTJ personality

types account for above 50% of the student cohort for the past four years.

This compares to an average in the general UK population of 10.4% (ESTJ)

and 13.7% (ISTJ) and for a sample of design students (Shen et al., 2007) of

4.2% (ESTJ) and 1.4% (ISTJ). It is interesting to note that there has been

a decline over the four years in the number of ENTJ types with Shen et

al. (2007) placing a particular importance on intuition rather than sensing

56

Table 2: MBTI category values on a normalised (–1 → +1) scale

MBTI E → I S → N T → F J → PMean Median Mean Median Mean Median Mean Median

2011 –0.26 –0.33 –0.15 –0.11 –0.28 –0.33 –0.41 –0.562012 –0.15 –0.11 –0.23 –0.33 –0.22 –0.33 –0.36 –0.332013 –0.30 –0.33 –0.25 –0.33 –0.27 –0.33 –0.38 –0.562014 –0.15 –0.11 –0.24 –0.33 –0.28 –0.33 –0.34 –0.56

Mean –0.22 –0.22 –0.22 –0.28 –0.26 –0.33 –0.37 –0.50

Table 3: MBTI category percentage splits (dominant category shown)

MBTI E (%) #SD S (%) #SD T (%) #SD J (%) #SD

2011 70.0 +0.55 66.7 –1.19 77.8 +0.92 82.2 +0.222012 64.8 –0.66 70.4 –0.15 67.6 –1.41 84.3 +0.652013 72.5 +1.12 75.4 +1.24 75.7 +0.37 84.1 +0.612014 63.4 –1.00 71.3 +0.10 74.3 +0.12 74.3 –1.47

Mean 67.7 70.9 73.8 81.2SD 4.3 3.6 4.4 4.7

as an indicator of creativity. It may be that the limited nature of the

questionnaire in comparison to the 93 questions indicated by Shen et al.

prevents the respective sets of data from being directly comparable.

Table 2 provides an indication of how far from a neutral position (zero)

in each of the dimensions the responses given by each student cohort on

a Likert scale are positioned. I have not seen this type of information

reported for MBTI although it is similar to the presentation of data adopted

by Kolb (1981) and Biglan (1973a, 1973b). It is observed that for the first

two dimensions in particular (extrovert–introvert and sensing–intuition)

the data indicates that student preference is closer to the neutral than the

extreme, while only for the final dimension (judging–perceiving) do the

responses move towards a more definite indication of preference.

Table 3 gives an indication of the extent to which each of the four

student cohorts varies in comparison to the average cohort. It is difficult

to draw conclusions from this data, although tempting to retrospectively

use the data to explain perceived characteristics of a group that could

be related to a multitude of factors. It is of interest that the cohort for

this year has a significantly lower percentage of extroverts and judging

personality types. Initial discussion with students and project supervisors

suggests that the cohort has been keen to adopt the proposed engineering

design process, although this may be because it has been presented to

them, having not been presented to previous cohorts, rather than being an

indication of group behaviour based on collective personality types.

57

In discussing MBTI characteristics it is difficult to suggest that an

individual’s response to any particular stimuli could be predicted based

on them being assigned to one of sixteen different types, in a similar way

that it seems improbable that our actions are guided by which sign of the

zodiac we happen to have been ascribed. The MBTI data will continue to

be used as part of the broader skills and experience questionnaire used to

ensure diversity amongst groups. This year the data has for the first time

been shared with the members of each group and discussions suggest that

the students have found it useful in appreciating the different perspectives

that individual group members could be operating from. I suspect its usage

will not develop beyond this, but its role in highlighting diversity may be

sufficient.

58

5 Conclusions

Civil engineering undergraduate curricula have traditionally focused on

engineering knowledge, with students being made aware of particular cur-

riculum content through module or course descriptors. More recently the

concepts of broad and deep knowledge or thinking have found acceptance

amongst engineering academics, as well as the notions of creativity and

leadership. Referring to the research aim of the work, the interpretation

of the interviews carried out as part of this dissertation illustrates that

confining curricula to the knowledge dimension is an unsatisfactory propo-

sition to prepare to graduates for roles in an ever changing and fragmenting

profession, although the concepts of broad and deep thinking are seen as

relevant. Creativity and leadership may be better viewed as desirable out-

comes dependent on a broad range of attributes, which may be displayed

through individual and group activities.

Characteristics or attributes associated with the knowledge, skills, atti-

tudes and experience dimensions must all be considered. Specific attributes

were identified in the skills dimension; communicate, collaborate, challenge

and convince; and the attitudes dimension; curiosity, courage, respect and

reflection.

Given the acceptance that the distinctive attributes of an engineer

should contribute to the ability to design, an interpretation of the engi-

neering design process is presented, intended to act as a framework to al-

low academics and students (teachers and learners) to position themselves

within. Each course within an existing curriculum may then be associ-

ated with a specific process, allowing an overview to be gained of which

processes may be under or over represented within teaching and learning

practice.

The historical categorisation of specific courses as ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ has in

my view damaged the perception of courses that may well encourage the

development of attributes beyond the knowledge dimension. I think we

need to stop discussing design courses in particular as helping to develop

‘soft skills’, when it is evident that the engineering profession views these

as ‘core skills’. I have also begun to question the need for the broad range

of core knowledge that is included in many civil engineering undergraduate

curricula. It is evident that industry requires graduates to have an aware-

ness and be able to communicate and collaborate with those from other

engineering and associated disciplines, but it is also evident that industry is

not, at least at graduate level, looking for people who can do it all, without

being able to do any of it from a sufficiently informed perspective.

Current curricula are crowded, leaving little time for students to crit-

ically reflect on educational experiences. I believe that allowing students

59

to specialise in order to provide them with time in which to generalise is

a workable solution. Whether in civil engineering this distinction is drawn

along the lines of building engineers and infrastructure engineers is a matter

for discussion, but it is my view that this is a discussion worth having. In a

similar manner education partnerships between universities and engineer-

ing consultancies seem an attractive proposition worth further discussion

and action.

The public perception of engineering was discussed in several of the in-

terviews. I see engineering as having a significant knowledge barrier. Unless

you have passed this knowledge barrier it is difficult to have an opinion on

the discipline, in a way that is not the case for other professions. I can for

example have opinions on medicine, or law, or finance, or architecture, al-

though these might not be recognised as valid opinions by those practising

within these disciplines. There are disciplines within engineering that I am

not comfortable with offering opinions on. I think access to this otherwise

inaccessible knowledge, as well as public conceptions of what do engineers

do, can only be changed through education, presenting engineering and

design as a process, extending through school and university. I am always

struck on the Royal Institution Engineering Masterclasses that I deliver

by how engaged school students are with the concept of the engineer as

a designer, engaged in a process focused on the physical realisation of an

idea.

This dissertation should be considered as developing conceptions of en-

gineering excellence and the role of universities in allowing students to de-

velop the knowledge, skills, attitudes and experiences required to produce

that engineering excellence.

60

6 Reflections

As I commented to one of the participants, this dissertation is ‘a bit dif-

ferent to my normal business, there’s some pushing of my comfort zone’.

I have found engaging with educational research to be challenging but ex-

tremely rewarding in allowing me to critically reflect on the ways, the hows

and the whys of undergraduate civil engineering education practice.

If I was to do it all again, would I do it differently? Reflecting on the ex-

perience I would definitely change some aspects relating to my own ways of

carrying out the research. When reading through the interview transcripts

there are a multitude of occasions when I think, why did I not follow that

up, or why did I keep following up on that? In terms of the participant

group selection, I think that choosing to interview engineering leaders on

their conceptions of engineering education exposed me to a collection of

views and opinions that rarely seem to be addressed within engineering

education.

The research process has allowed me to critically reflect on my own

educational practice with continuing changes being made to the Group

Design Projects, including making students aware of the engineering design

process, learning levels, and broad and deep thinking as parallel processes.

I have also made changes on my other courses, introducing demonstrations

and pop-up labs, while the notion of ‘design what you build’ has stayed with

me as a concept for future development. The need to provide opportunities

for students to develop in the knowledge, skills, attitudes and experience

dimensions has been made clearer to me.

In thinking about developing the work further I am of the view that

this should be done in partnership with all or several of the participants, at

least if it is to progress beyond the focus group stage. While I appreciate

the need for an education ethics review process, I am now of the view that

if changes in engineering education, motivated in part by this work, are to

be bought about, these require the active involvement of a group of people

engaged in opening up private discussions to public debate.

As a final thought I was struck in reading and rereading the quotes and

transcripts at how many times the phrase, ‘you know’ is used. For me this

perhaps best illustrates the aim of the research, in that I suspect on many

occasions the question, ‘you know?’ should be met with the response, ‘well

actually, I didn’t’.

61

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Appendices

• Appendix A:

Interview question schedule

• Appendix B:

Participant information sheet

• Appendix C:

Participant consent form

• Appendix D:

Education Ethics Review Process (EERP)

Approved ethics application

• Appendix E:

Samples of an annotated transcript and loose leaf analysis notes

67

Conceptions of Engineering Leadership and the Role of Universities in Developing Engineering Leaders

Main Question Follow-up Questions

1. What civil engineering projects are you working on at the moment?

1.1 Have any of the projects presented particular challenges?1.2 What skills have helped you on the projects?

2. What career path did you take to get your current job?

2.1 What skills do you think have helped you in your career?2.2 What skills in particular do you think help you in your current job?

3. What do you understand by the phrase 'engineering leadership'?

3.1 How important do you think broad thinking, deep thinking and creativity are in engineering leadership?3.2 Do you think broad thinking, deep thinking and creativity are related to each other?

4. How would you describe your role as an engineering leader?

4.1 How do you describe yourself, what does it say on your business card (emphasis on engineer or leader)?4.2 How do you make decisions and what skills do you rely on when making them?4.3 How much do you rely on the team around you?4.4 What do you think is this difference between an engineering leader and an architect?

5. When appointing a graduate civil engineer what characteristics do you look for?

5.1 Are you looking to recruit team players or team leaders?5.2 Is there a difference between team players and team leaders?5.3 How important are broad thinking, deep thinking, and creativity?5.4 What other characteristics are important?

6. What do you think the role of universities is in developing civil engineers?

6.1 How much should universities focus on an academic curriculum, focusing or core knowledge and understanding?6.2 How much should universities focus on a vocation curriculum, focusing on practical experience, including group working?6.3 Is there an appropriate mix and order between academic and vocational approaches?6.4 How do you think universities can promote broad thinking, deep thinking and creativity?

7. What do you think the role of universities is in developing engineering leaders?

7.1 Do you think universities should be responsible for developing engineering leadership?7.2 How do you think universities can develop engineering leaders?7.3 Can leadership skills be taught separately to engineering skills?7.4 Do you need to be an engineer to be an engineering leader?7.5 What skills were you taught at university that have helped you become an engineering leader?7.6 What skills do you wish you had been taught at university to help you become an engineering leader?

8. Is there anything you would like to add? 8.1 Are there any questions you would like to revisit?8.2 Is there anything you think has been missed?

25 February 2014

Participant Information Sheet

Conceptions of Engineering Leadership and the Role of Universities in Developing Engineering Leaders

Lead Researcher: Dr Andrew Phillips

Introduction:

I am looking for civil engineering leaders to be interviewed and possibly to meet as a focus group as part of a study to

investigate conceptions of the skills required for engineering leadership and the role of universities in developing these

skills. Before you decide whether to contribute to this research it is important to understanding why the research is being

conducted and what it will involve.

What is the purpose of the study?

The purpose of the study is to investigate conceptions of engineering leadership, in particular conceptions of the skills

required to be an engineering leader. Civil Engineering courses can be viewed as a mix between the acquisition of hard

skills such as technical knowledge and understanding, and soft skills such as creative design and group work. The study

seeks to investigate what an appropriate mix of these skills is considered to be, and more generally what the role of

universities should be in developing engineering leaders.

Why have I been invited?

You have been invited as you have been identified as an engineering leader with existing or previous involvement with

the MEng degree course in Civil Engineering at Imperial College London.

Do I have to take part?

It is up to you to decide whether or not to take part. If you decide to take part you will be asked to sign a participant

consent form. If you decide to take part you are free to withdraw at any time prior to the analysis and publication of data

from the study without giving a reason.

What will happen next if I choose to take part?

I will contact you to arrange a date, time and location for the interview. You will also be asked to sign a participant

consent form prior to the interview. Interviews are expected to last around an hour and will be audio recorded. Following

transcription of the interview I may contact you again for clarification on any issues. It is possible that I may request a

further interview or ask you to take part in a focus group to explore particular areas of interest. If you are asked to take

part in a focus group this may be video as well as audio recorded in order to aid transcription.

Participants will not be offered any reimbursement for their participation.

Will my taking part in this study be kept confidential?

All information obtained during the interview will be kept strictly confidential. Any information about you will be kept

anonymous. All procedures for handling, processing, storage and destruction of the data are compliant with the Data

Protection Act, 1988 and with Imperial College London guidelines.

Should you wish your contribution to the research to be acknowledged this should be clearly indicated on the consent

form. If you indicate that you wish your contribution to be acknowledged you will be acknowledged in reports and

publications resulting from the work. All other information will be kept anonymous.

Who is funding the research study?

The study is being funded by Imperial College London to the extent that they are waiving the fees of the Lead Researcher

(Dr Andrew Phillips)

P.T.O.

Page 1 of 2

What will happen to the results of the research study?

The study forms course work for my Masters in University Learning and Teaching (MEd ULT) at Imperial College London.

The resulting dissertation will be presented to course assessors for assessment. Results may be published in relevant

journals and shared with conference delegates if appropriate. Unless requested you will not be identified in any

publication.

Who has reviewed the research study?

The project, the plan and arrangements for this research study were approved through the Imperial College London

Educational Ethics Review Process.

Contact for further information

If you have any further queries, please contact the Lead Researcher (Dr Andrew Phillips) using the contact details below:

Email: andrew.phillips@imperial.ac.uk

Telephone: +44(0)207 594 6081

Thank you for taking time to read this Contributor Information Sheet.

If you would like to take part in the research study, please express your interest by replying to the email that will be sent

to you shortly.

Page 2 of 2

Participant Consent Form

Conceptions of Engineering Leadership and the Role of Universities in Developing Engineering LeadersLead Researcher: Dr Andrew Phillips

Please initial the relevant boxes:

1. I confirm that I have read and understood the Participant Information Sheet dated 25 February 2014 explaining the research study, and I have had the opportunity to ask questions about the project.

2. I understand that my participation is voluntary and that I am free to withdraw at any time prior to the analysis and publication of data from the study without giving reason and without there being any negative consequences. In addition, should I not wish to answer any particular question or questions, I am free to decline.

3. Please select one of the options:

a) I do not wish my contribution to the research study to be acknowledged. I understand that my individual responses will be kept strictly confidential and I give permission for members of the research team to have access to my anonymised responses. I understand that my name will not be linked with research materials. I will not be acknowledged in the reports, publications and presentations that result from the research study.

Or:

b) I do wish my contribution to the research study to be acknowledged. I understand that my individual responses will be kept strictly confidential and I give permission for members of the research team to have access to my anonymised responses. I understand that my name will be linked with research materials. I will be acknowledged in the reports, publications and presentations that result from the research study.

4. I agree to the audio recording of any interviews and video and audio recording of focus groups conducted as part of the research study. I also agree to provide originals or copies of any notes or illustrative sketches made by me as part of the research study.

5. I understand that anonymised data collected from me may be used in future research.

6. I agree to take part in the above research study.

_______________________ _________________ _______________________Name of Participant Date Signature

_______________________ _________________ _______________________Lead Researcher Date Signature

Copies: Once this has been signed by all parties the participant should receive a copy of the signed and dated participant consent form, the Participant Information Sheet and and other written information provided to participants. A copy of the signed and dated consent form will be kept in a secure location with other documents relating to the research study.

1.1 First name: Andrew

1.2 Family name: Phillips

1.3 Address: Imperial College London Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Skempton Building South Kensington Campus London SW7 2AZ

1.4 Telephone: 02075946081

1.5 Email: andrew.phillips@imperial.ac.uk

1.6 Title of study: Conceptions of engineering leadership and the role of universities in developing engineering leaders

1.7 Proposed start date: 01/02/2014

1.8 Proposed end date: 31/05/2014

1.9 Are there co-investigators? No

1.10 First name (Primary co-investigator):

1.11 Family name (Primary co-investigator):

1.12 Email (Primary co-investigator):

1.13 List name and email of any other co-investigators:

1.14 Is this a student project? Yes

1.15 First name (Supervisor): David

1.16 Family name (Supervisor): Riley

1.17 Email (Supervisor): d.riley@imperial.ac.uk

1.18 Course of study: MEd ULT

1.19 Project deadline: 02/06/2014

1.20 Has your supervisor read and agreed this application?

Yes

Does your study involve any of the following?

2.5 Has any part of this proposal received prior ethicalapproval?

No

2.6 Has any part of this proposal been rejected by an ethics committee?

No

Further Details:

2.7 What is your main research question? The primary aim of the research is to assess conceptions of the role of universities in developing engineering leaders. The

secondary aims of the research are to investigate conceptions of what skills are required to be an engineering leader and in the context of civil engineering what role universities have in developing these skills. A priori it is thought that engineering leaders are capable of broad thinking, deep thinking and creativity. The work sets out to assess if this is the case, or if other skill-sets are considered to be important. The work will assess what role MEng civil engineering curricula are considered to play in developing these skill-sets. There is a sense that engineering programmes in the UK, North America and Europe are successful in producing either broad or deep thinkers but not both. Creativity is a characteristic that universities are encouraged to develop in students; however this is often approached in isolation from the rest of the curriculum. The project will investigate the concept of conflicting curricula approaches, as well as exploring what characteristics industry leaders valueand expect in engineering graduates and whether existing degree curricula are likely to be successful in producing graduates with these skill-sets.

2.8 Please list any sub question(s): The project will assess what skill-sets engineer leaders rely on in making decisions. A priori it is thought that skills will either be considered as related to core knowledge and understanding, or related to practical experience including those related to group working; while creativity is likely to be an additional consideration. There are parallels with alternative curricula types. The project will seek to investigate what balance industry leaders feel there should be between academic and vocational curricula.

2.9 What is the rationale for the study? The rationale is to provide information for those developing civil engineering MEng curricula focused on meeting industry expectations and requirements. It has been decided to interview industry leaders who have an association with Imperial College London as they will be involved in the recruitment of graduates from a range of degree and non-degree backgrounds. Hence they are likely to have reflected on the characteristics they believe are required. They will also have had the opportunity to reflect on what they believe is required of a degree programme to bring about these qualities. There are only arelatively small number of individuals who fulfil these criteria. Hence the work will be carried out against a background of previous discussions in which the themes of creativity and broad and deep thinking have been identified a priori. The work will be carried out using a modified grounded theory approach so that it can be developed to accommodate additional concepts.

2.10 Methods - check all you intend to use: Interviews; Focus groups

Please provide brief details of any other methods:

2.11 Location - check all/any places that may apply: Imperial College premises; Other private place (please specify & describe below); Other public place (please specify & describe below)

Please provide brief details of other private or public places:

Interviews with industry leaders are likely to be undertaken either at their offices or in a public place such as a coffee shop. Itis possible that interviews may be conducted on College premises. If time permits it is planned to hold a focus group of those who have already been interviewed on College premises, although it is possible this will be held after submission of the dissertation.

2.12 Participants - sort of people you are looking to recruit into the project (incl. inclusion/exclusion criteria)?

Industry leaders. Three to five civil engineering leaders will be approached. As mentioned the number of potential participantsis relatively low (10 or fewer) and is limited to those already known by the researcher. In addition to provide a richer background it is proposed to interview a retired academic and a risk enterprise manager with a civil engineering background, both of whom are also already known to the researcher.

2.13 Recruitment - how will participants be approached & recruited?

Industry leaders will be approached and recruited through existing contacts. Several of these contacts are already involved in professional conversations related to civil engineering education within and without the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London. Due to their professional standing it is likely that participants will wishto be acknowledged as contributing to the study. The participant consent form and information sheet have been altered to reflect this.

2.14 Consent - will participants get an information Yes

sheet with adequate reading time?

Will participants (except those just completing questionnaires) sign a consent form?

Yes

Will participants be informed that returning a questionnaire implies consent to participate?

N/A

Will participants have the right to withdraw and remove ‘their data’?

Yes

2.15 Confidentiality - will questionnaires be anonymous or anonymised as soon as possible?

N/A

Will any transcripts be anonymised/pseudomised as soon as possible?

Yes

Will identifiers &/or pseudonyms be stored securely & separately from research data?

Yes

Will data & records be held securely & in accordance with Imperial guidelines?

Yes

2.16 Incentives - will you offer incentives to participants (financial or otherwise)?

No incentives will be offered to take part in the study. Refreshment will be provided during interviews where these take place at Imperial College London or a public location. Where interviews are held at the interviewee's place of work it is assumed they will provide refreshment if required.

2.17 Value - provide a brief description of benefits this work may provide to you, participants & others:

The work should provide valuable insight into industry expectations for an MEng degree. This could have impact in changing the curriculum of the MEng civil engineering degree at Imperial College London. Publishing of the findings should also be of interested to course organisers and curriculum designers. It may also have impact through reflection in industry on student experience at the start of an engineering career.

2.18 Dissemination - provide a brief description of how this study will be communicated both within Imperial & beyond:

Journal article / report. Follow-up meetings and presentations with industry and interested parties such as the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Engineering Council. These dissemination routes have been chosen as universities, companies and the engineering institutions are considered to be the key players and stakeholders for the study.

2.19 Summary & justification of method(s): The use of semi-structured interviews will allow key areas to be investigated while allowing for participants to spend time on areas they may feel are particularly important. Interviews will be audio recorded and as engineers frequently used diagrams to convey concepts participants will be asked to provide originals or copies of any sketches or diagrams made during the interviews. The participant consent form and information sheet have been altered to reflect this. Collection of an audio recording of the interview, as well as collection of sketches and diagrams, will allow for transcription and analysis following the interview. Analysis will initially focus on the a priori themes using a modified grounded theory approach (albeit unlikely to achieve saturation) to extend to other concepts if necessary. Time permitting each interview and analysis will be conducted inseries to allow for adjustments to the interview structure throughout the study. The use of a focus group following the interviews (if time permits) will allow participants to add to their individual responses based on material processed by the investigator. A focus group will allow areas that may only have been touched on during the interviews to be explored in more depth if they find resonance with the participants.

3.1 Confirm that you have considered each of the following ethical issues:

Power issues

3.2 Ethical Summary - explain how all relevant ethicalissues have been appropriately considered:

There are potential power issues with interviewing industry leaders in that they may feel they are able to exert influence over the Civil Engineering MEng degree curriculum at Imperial College London. It will be made clear to them that it is general views that are being sought, although they may wish to illustrate them with specific reference to the Imperial degree. While reference to the Imperial degree may be appropriate based on their experience they will be encouraged to think more generally. There is an issue related to recognition of time spent by interviewees contributing to the project. It may be the case that they would like to be named as contributing to the project. In addition knowledge of the project contributors may provide validation and legitimacy when presenting findings to interested parties such as the Institution of Civil Engineers. The consent form will ask each interviewee if they would like their contribution to the study to be acknowledged. All comments will be anonymised regardless of whether a contributor is acknowledged. This process is explained on the Participant Information Sheet and on the Participant Consent Form.

The research does not involve students or assessment. In addition given the experience, professional roles and personalities of potential participants the research does not involve participants who may be coerced into giving particular responses. It is expected given their professional experience that participants will be able to provide appropriate responses (or non-responses) to questions considered personally or commercially sensitive.

With reference to the BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (2011) the applicant recognises that I have an obligation to Imperial College London and the educational research community not to harm their reputation and to conduct research with integrity, authenticity and professionalism; just as the opportunity to conduct this research relies on my predecessors having carried out research with the same qualities.

4.1 Supporting Documentation - check any/all that you attach:

Participant information sheet; Participant consent form; Interview / Focus group questions