Call number: LD2668 .T4 1984 H36 / Master of Arts

Many researchers in engineering education have studied the engineering curriculum, employability, industrial training, generic skills and gender issues. From a wide spectrum of study, there is a gap around issues of interpersonal skills and enterprise skills in engineering education that has not been studied. Previous study has shown that there is unemployment amongst graduate engineers in Malaysia. This study aimed to assess whether the suggested lack of interpersonal and enterprise skills competencies cause unemployment amongst engineering graduates in Malaysia. This study also intended to appraise whether engineering undergraduates have received a quality work placement appropriate to their learning, knowledge and employability skills and also to create awareness about interpersonal and enterprise skills competencies amongst engineering undergraduates, higher education educators and employers in Malaysia. This study intended to create awareness about the importance of interpersonal and enterprise skills amongst engineers. A mixed method of questionnaire survey and interview was used to access data from final year engineering students and employers in Malaysia. Results from the study have provided evidence that interpersonal and enterprise skills are not a major contributor to unemployment of engineering graduates in Malaysia. This study has created new awareness of the subject that will allow the enhancement of the engineering education curriculum. This study has demonstrated that when interviewing companies for the purposes of research into curriculum it is necessary to have full awareness of their culture and ways of working.

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

Engineers Without Borders New Zealand (EWBNZ) has recently reached a stage in its organisational growth where a new strategy is needed to ensure its future engineering development initiatives are more consistent with its guiding philosophy of delivering sustainable long term development projects. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the perceptions of the committee tasked with delivering projects revealed a preference for a strategy which enabled ‘placement’ type projects. To develop this strategy a qualitative analysis was conducted which focused on ascertaining what strategies and organisational structures are employed by comparable EWB organisations to deliver development projects. This process revealed EWB Australia to have a placement project process model which was deemed as the most acceptable to replicate. An implementation strategy and supporting set of recommendations were provided for this new placement project strategy. The most significant recommendation given to support this new strategy was to concentrate EWBNZ’s resources by prioritising projects in only two of the four countries EWBNZ currently operates. The countries deemed a strategic priority were Samoa and Tonga.

This thesis evaluated the requirement and provides course improvement recommendations forTelecommunications Systems Engineering EO3502 taught at the Naval Postgraduate School Other graduate programs in Information Technology Management were evaluated to determine the standard for telecommunications engineering expected from some of the most respected academic institutions. Graduates of NPS's Information Technology Management (ITM) and Information Systems andOperations (ISO) curriculums were surveyed to determine how important telecommunicationsengineering is for their follow-on assignments. In addition, lesson topic vignettes were developed toprovide fleet/field examples to reinforce the relevance if individual topics. Finally, recommendationswere provided for improving EO3502 and the ITM curriculum in general. / Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Organizations are changing faster than ever underscoring the importance of being learning agile—that is, learning new concepts and skills quickly while integrating learnings from past experiences to new situations in order to be successful (Mitchinson & Morris, 2012). Learning agility has been a topic of interest for almost two decades, and while research to date has demonstrated a positive relationship between learning agility and various performance outcomes (Dries, Vantilborgh, & Pepermans, 2012; Lombard & Eichinger, 2000; Smith, 2015), it remains to be seen whether certain contextual variables enhance, diminish, or altogether change learning agility’s positive impact on performance (DeRue, Ashford, & Myers, 2012). This research examined organizational climate rooted in psychological safety as a contextual factor, or moderator, and how it influences when learning agility leads to high performance. While learning agility and psychologically safe climate were not significant predictors of performance, a marginally significant interaction revealed that when an organization’s climate is perceived as low in psychological safety, those who score lower on learning agility perform worse than highly learning agile individuals. However, counterintuitive findings suggest than when the organization’s climate is perceived as high in psychological safety, those who score lower on learning agility outperform those who score higher on learning agility. Exploratory and post-hoc analyses are used to better understand the data and the organizational context in which the results occurred. Directions for future research are discussed along with implications for organizations.

Organizations struggle to comply with legal requirements as well as customers' calls for better data protection. On the implementation level, incorporation of privacy protections in products and services depends on the commitment of the engineers who design them. We interviewed six senior engineers, who work for globally leading IT corporations and research institutions, to inves- tigate their motivation and ability to comply with privacy regulations. Our findings point to a lack of perceived responsibility, control, autonomy, and frustrations with interactions with the legal world. While we increasingly call on engineers to go beyond functional requirements and be responsive to human values in our increasingly technological society, we may be facing the dilemma of asking engineers to live up to a challenge they are currently not ready to embrace.

Transition is a common characteristic of our lives, particularly in a rapidly changing world. In this context, how careers are enacted has become increasingly varied, requiring new conceptual tools to study the transitions of learners and workers. This paper uses theoretical constructs from the literature on boundaryless career discourse as well as learning and on work transitioning in order to explore the learning pathways of environmental engineers. It thus contributes to empirical work that articulates ongoing transitions (beyond the first job) within ‘occupational and organisational life’, as well as to the understanding of learning pathways as educational and occupational progression. The career stories help us to understand how non-linear transitions emerge, the complexity of these transitions, and the need to attend to broader institutional arrangements within and across education and training, the labour market and the workplace. Through its focus on the environmental engineer, it helps us to understand the processes and outcomes of transitions in an important occupation in contemporary professional work in South Africa. Finally, in a field dominated by research on entry into a first job, the paper also provides much-needed insights into occupational transitions into specialised work.

Before this research study began, relatively little was understood of the water supply in Constantinople, particularly within the walls of the city. Archaeological work had focused on collecting details of 160 cisterns and a small number of channels and pipes were incidental finds in other excavations. Although no-one had considered the water supply in Constantinople as a whole, the evidence seemed to indicate a sophisticated water management system. With the available data fragmented, and the potential for more evidence limited to serendipitous finds associated with construction work, the only way to move the understanding of the water supply forward is to take a radically different perspective: civil engineers are well placed to envisage the water supply as a working system and make use of their modern design skills and tools to fill in the gaps between the fragmented data. This reimagining of the water supply system was driven by a key piece of knowledge: the water supply worked, and worked for many centuries. That fact, combined with the fragments of physical and literary evidence, the largely unchanged landscape and the fundamental physical laws governing gravity-fed water systems, are enough to start filling in the information to create a complete system. The core work in reimagining the water supply system has been developing an understanding of the physical infrastructure of the distribution system. Although the two most recent and comprehensive studies appeared to agree that there were about 159 cisterns in the city, close examination of the available data showed that there were actually 209 with the possibility of more. An evaluation of the aqueduct routes in previous studies highlighted inconsistencies with newly available evidence: alternative routes were designed that tied together the available evidence, providing a consistently downhill route, shorter and more straightforward to construct. Having established the number and spread of cisterns and the locations of the aqueducts, it was possible to create a network delivering water from the aqueduct channels to the cisterns for collection by the public. Consideration has also been given to what occurs at either end of this physical infrastructure. At the upstream end, quantifying and characterising the water source defines the water available to distribute and helps to indicate the purpose of the cisterns. At the downstream end, developing even a basic model of water consumption has enabled the distribution network to move from a static artefact to a system with a quantifiable purpose. The combination of the physical infrastructure, inflow data and demand assumptions in an agent-based model demonstrate that the decisions and assumption made within each element work together and allow a fourth element, management, to be considered. The agent-based model of the water supply enables consideration of a dynamic system and the exploration of a number of 'what if?' scenarios. This exploration concludes that the cistern-based distribution system probably developed because of fluctuations in inflow. It may have been possible for the city to use a merged arrangement on the Aqueduct of Valens inflow, but the burden of pro-active management required to make it successful suggests that a parallel arrangement is more likely. There was likely to be an interconnection between the two main aqueducts, which would have enabled the use of water stored in the largest open-air cisterns.