Embedding a professional identity framework into faculty with several disciplines - A case study

Identity in engineering education has gained interest as a construct to improve academic attainment and retention, and to encourage students to graduate into engineering careers. Engineering identity is distinct and related to the constructs of motivation and self-efficacy. Many engineering faculty explicitly influence students' engineering identity development through skills inventories, and provide opportunities for enhanced skill development by reflective learning exercises. We report a case study describing how we introduced a novel professional identity framework into an engineering faculty which offers degree programmes across several disciplines. We describe its structure which comprises of four dimensions: Accreditation, Institution, Habits of Mind, and Career, with each dimension being characterised by a distinct skill inventory. We discuss our tactics for embedding this framework into an established setting, and explore some of its immediate benefits; monitoring skill progression across students years by self-ratings, measuring staff comprehension and engagement via the coding of their module descriptions, and measuring student understanding via the automatic natural language processing of student reflections on how their identity is progressing. Our framework and its embedding has the potential to encourage engineering faculty to think beyond accreditation requirements during programme development, improve module designs, and motivate students' skill development and career choice.