Contextualizing professional development in the engineering classroom

A lack of professional development opportunities has been reported as a significant reason for choosing to drop out of the engineering major at the undergraduate level. To address this issue, nine professional development course modules were developed and placed into the context of a number of different engineering courses. Several aspects of professional development were addressed, including engineering education in the context of overall educational goals, professional communication, career building strategies, and learning and personality styles as they relate to engineering. The modules were first implemented in a professional development intervention course, and then exported to several gateway engineering courses at three universities. Assessment of the professional development intervention course indicated substantial, statistically significant increases in the students´ meta-cognitive awareness of the professional world. In two of the four first-time offerings of the gateway courses, aggregate results showed that integrating the professional development modules into these courses provided significant improvements in student awareness (meta-cognition) of the professional world.