Early-Career Engineers on Navigating Mentorship and Career Transitions

This project examines the professional development, mentoring, and career retention of early-career engineers, with a focus on how individuals build and use resources to navigate the early stages of their careers. Decisions made in the first years of practice can strongly influence long-term professional pathways and the stability of the engineering workforce. By investigating the experiences and mentoring relationships that shape these formative years, the project seeks to identify strategies that support engineers’ success, resilience, and sustained engagement in the field. Using qualitative methods and narrative inquiry, the research will trace the career stories of early-career engineers and document the strategies they use to navigate entry into the engineering profession. The project aligns with NSF’s mission to strengthen the U.S. STEM workforce by advancing understanding of factors that expand professional development and support productive, long-term participation in engineering across the nation. The study focuses on how early-career engineers develop and apply career navigation skills and how mentoring relationships contribute to their professional integration. The research will employ multiple interviews with participants, followed by systematic analysis and restorying of the data into narrative case profiles that highlight critical decision points, supports, and obstacles. The project will also include interviews with mentors identified by participants to illuminate mentoring practices that foster growth, learning, and retention. The goals are to identify how career navigation resources are cultivated and used; to understand how organizational environments shape early-career development; and to offer new insight into the skills, supports, and forms of capital that enable engineers to remain and advance in the profession. Expected outcomes include a detailed account of early- career professional formation in engineering that can inform mentoring programs, organizational policies, and workforce development initiatives aimed at improving retention and building a resilient STEM workforce capable of addressing complex national and global challenges. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.