INCULCATING AND FOSTERING LEADERSHIP SKILLS FOR TODAY'S ENGINEERS - THE GORDON ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP PROGRAM AT NORTHESTERN UNIVERSITY

Gaps in engineering education, perception of career tracks, and demographics associated with cyclical hiring practices have insufficiently educated the engineering workforce, most critically in training technical leaders capable of competently bringing a product to market. The traditional leadership path using apprenticeships, mentoring, and gradually increasing responsibility in running progressively larger teams, is heavily dependent upon opportunity. The perfect alignment of these opportunities to lead, and availability of talented engineers who are ready to lead rarely occurs in today’s lean corporate environment. Hence in many cases, high potential employees are put in positions to lead, beyond what their level of genuine experience has prepared them for. Engineering executives have estimated that when relatively unseasoned engineers are tasked to run their first team or project, nearly 80% fail in satisfying all of the project’s critical requirements, either missing on functionality, performance, quality, time-tomarket, cost or other key objectives. The Gordon Engineering Leadership Program at Northeastern University targets the key soft skills, organizational awareness, and technical agility to accelerate the development of leadership skills in an engineering environment. Started with a grant bestowed by Dr. Bernard Gordon the program actively works with over 20 industry partners in honing the key knowledge, skills and attitudes essential in accelerating the building of a new generation of game-changing engineering leaders. The program consists of class work in scientific foundations and in engineering leadership – to establish solid background of technical tools for general appreciation of engineering solution approaches, and to provide project management tools for leading teams and effectively attaining goals – and the Challenge Project, which is a master’s thesis-equivalent tightly-scheduled, deliverable-oriented demonstration of human and material resource management and engineering problem solving. A growing consortium with programs at other major universities is working to advance and share research, curricula and best practices in this area.