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A Methodological Approach to Developing Stakeholder Defined Demand-Pull Requirements for Graduate-Level Industrial Engineering Graduates

David H. Hartmann, Ph.D.

Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, University of Central Oklahoma

Introduction

Manufacturing and service organizations generate outputs to satisfy the needs of the consumer whose perceptions and judgments are shaped by an environment of political, economic, social, and technological change. Products and service outputs result from processes supported by these companies’ engineering employees, who may be also represented as an “output” from a diverse set of originating sources. Such “sources” can be the “general workforce,” direct accession from high school, or graduates of higher education engineering programs.

As the source for granting degrees to industrial engineering undergraduate and graduate-level students, engineering higher education is motivated to adapt to the manufacturing and service consumer’s changing requirements for an educated engineering employee. This motivation may be partially based on institutional and departmental-level accreditations, a critically important concern for stakeholders in institutions and the institutions’ engineering departments. While an accreditation is alone significant and requires an institution/department to plan, collect, archive, and employ feedback data representing the explicit needs of the stakeholder in the output of academic programs, there also exists other significant “drivers” [motivators] acting upon an institution to better understand the consumer. These drivers may be generally provoked from an institutional appreciation for a singular body of knowledge; a recognition of an expanding market for “on demand,” on-line education; and, finally, efforts to incorporate quality, technology, and a diversity of institutionally unique program outcomes demanded by the consumer into engineering programs.

Earlier scholarly research of engineering education revealed that the engineering discipline, and in particular industrial engineering, “…has problems, such as a theoretical approach to problem solving, insufficient understanding of real-life problems, and poor communication skills. [1] Further, engineering education research has not been discriminant in modeling the graduate and undergraduate consumer. A conclusion may be that an imprecise definition of the term “student” [graduate or undergraduate] could affect the process of educating the graduate-level industrial engineer such that their subsequent presentation as a candidate for the workforce community is not “aligned” with that community’s needs. [2]

“Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Hartmann, D. (2005, June), A Methodological Approach To Developing Stakeholder Defined Demand Pull Requirements For Graduate Level Industrial Engineering Graduates Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14588