Manufacturing Skills Workshops: A Hands-On Model for Developing Engineering Identity, Technical Competence, and Engineering Career Interest

The United States faces a critical shortage of engineers prepared for careers in manufacturing. Industry projections call for 3.8 million new manufacturing employees in the next decade, with one-third of engineering roles expected to remain unfilled. Despite this demand, fewer than half of students who earn engineering degrees enter engineering careers, and manufacturers report that foundational hands-on skills are among the most persistent gaps in new hires. This project will study whether embedding a series of hands-on manufacturing workshops throughout the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum can change that trajectory. Students will progress through five Manufacturing Skills Workshops distributed from their first year through senior year, with each workshop building on the last: from basic hand tools and safety in the first year to milling, turning, and welding by senior year. The project will examine whether this kind of early, repeated, authentic experience strengthens students' sense of being an engineer, their confidence in their own technical abilities, and their interest in manufacturing careers. The findings will provide the evidence base for a scalable curriculum model that other engineering programs can adopt, directly supporting the national goal of a larger and better-prepared technical workforce. This project will conduct a five-year longitudinal mixed-methods study of more than 1,000 mechanical engineering students across four entering cohorts at The University of Texas at Dallas, in collaboration with researchers at Texas A&M University. The study will test five hypotheses tracing a competence-to-confidence-to-career developmental pathway: (1) early workshop experiences strengthen engineering identity and first-to-second-year retention; (2) successive mastery experiences build engineering self-efficacy; (3) workshop participation develops foundational manufacturing competence transferable to internship settings; (4) the workshop series increases awareness of and interest in engineering and manufacturing careers; and (5) graduates of the full program show stronger early-career outcomes. Using a quasi-experimental design with same-year bioengineering students and pre-intervention mechanical engineering cohorts as controls, quantitative data will be collected through the Engineering Identity Survey, the Engineering Self-Efficacy Scale, the STEM Career Interest Survey, manufacturing competency assessments, and structured internship supervisor evaluations at multiple points across each cohort's four-year arc. Qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and focus groups will provide mechanistic insight into student development. Mixed-methods analysis will integrate these data to establish how intervention timing, sequencing, and content emphasis influence outcomes across diverse student populations. The project will advance engineering identity theory and social cognitive career theory by examining the developmental pathway from technical competence to sustained career interest. An open-access toolkit of validated instruments, safety protocols, and instructional materials will be developed to enable adoption of the workshop model across STEM disciplines where hands-on competence is a workforce priority. This project is supported by NSF’s EDU Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring. 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.