This planning project will build capacity for the Kansas State University Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Department and its collaborators to transform the industrial engineering undergraduate degree program into a career startup accelerator called Skill Xcelerator. In the transformed department, each student is empowered and supported to develop their unique industrial engineering identity, master in-demand technical and professional skills, and graduate ready to address society’s most complex challenges. In the Skill Xcelerator analogy, students are startups, and their graduation with an engineering degree represents the initial public offering. The valuation for each new startup is measured by the skills and experiences the student has accrued. The industrial engineering department, including the people, curriculum, co-curricular experiences, and environment, functions as an accelerator to position students for a successful launch. This planning project will examine the perspectives of invested parties, including students, faculty, administrators, alumni, and industry partners, to identify essential elements for transforming the educational experience using the Skill Xcelerator framework. By providing a platform for department faculty to partner with learning science experts to pilot evidence-based teaching innovations, the project will build a cohesive interdisciplinary team of partners in change. These activities will produce a data-driven roadmap for departmental change aligned with NSF’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program and its focus on the professional formation of engineers. The planning project will position the team to submit a full proposal that, consistent with the NSF RED program’s purpose, envisions transformative changes to the department’s culture, organization, structure, and pedagogy. This work serves the national interest by advancing research on engineering education while cultivating a globally competitive workforce.

The central objective of this planning project is to identify specific needs for and attitudes toward change in the Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Department at Kansas State University. The project will combine qualitative and quantitative methods to gain insight into invested parties’ values and priorities regarding the industrial engineering undergraduate degree program and the Skill Xcelerator components. It also will examine faculty members’ perspectives on potential departmental change using semi-structured interviews with questions grounded in expectancy value theory. A monthly seminar series and mini-grants to support pilot course interventions will build partnerships between department faculty and experts in learning science and change management. Together, these activities will advance understanding about context-specific factors, which, when coupled with broader knowledge about professional formation and change management, will enable the team to articulate a plan for revolutionizing the department. The full RED proposal envisioned as a product of this planning project will study the Skill Xcelerator’s impact on students’ self-efficacy and engineering identity within a sociocultural context. The Skill Xcelerator incorporates evidence-based practices to facilitate professional formation of engineers. By explicitly engaging students’ values, developing self-efficacy, and focusing both on individual and cultural factors influencing student success, we expect to increase retention and graduation in industrial engineering and add to the growing body of knowledge about professional formation of engineers.