Preparing university students for global workforces: Comparisons between engineering and business school students

There is a growing concern among universities that students in undergraduate and graduate engineering and business programs will be unprepared or underprepared to work in global workforces. In their 2005 publication, Engineers for 2020, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) urged university engineering schools nationwide to embed curriculum and assessment measures into academic programs that provide opportunities and associated assessment metrics to meet this international challenge. Specifically, the NAE charges universities and colleges to prepare engineers that are leaders in global engineering fields with strong communication, leadership and interdisciplinary research, and professional skills in diverse in engineering environments. Businesses, and business school have similar globally focused charges. This paper describes a university´s response to an important challenge of preparing students for global workforces. This paper describes assessment metrics related to preparedness for working in diverse globally focused engineering and business contexts. In this study, engineering and business school students received interdisciplinary globally focused training via their coursework, research and international field experiences and were assessed as to their preparedness to work in global workforces, research, and diverse environments. Accordingly, global preparedness index was developed and administered to assess the impact of diverse educational and research experiences summatively. Results of this important assessment metric were compared across programs and to students´ course grades, work related efficacy, international field experiences and outcomes-based academic program success. Results of this research indicate that engineering and business students who were most globally prepared were also most efficacious, had international experiences, and received higher grades in courses. Additionally, diversity in preparedness among the subscales of the index was- - noted, suggesting that students with diverse socio-demographic profiles had diverse preparedness indices.