Representation of future-focused teaching capabilities in selection criteria used to recruit Australian engineering academics

CONTEXT: To better prepare graduates for the demands of professional practice, approaches to engineering education need to continuously evolve. The recent “Engineering 2035 Project” commissioned by the Australian Council of Engineering Deans explored this within the Australian context, with the goal of setting a direction for change within the sector (Burnett et al., 2021). One aspect of the project identified future-focused teaching capabilities required of educators to deliver on the vision. PURPOSE: The study focuses on the research question: How are teaching capabilities represented in current Australian engineering academic recruitment? APPROACH: Publicly available engineering academic job advertisements posted between July 2021 and February 2022 were collected. The final data set comprised 52 job advertisements from 21 institutions, and consisted of 593 individual selection criteria. The job advertisements were then reviewed through the lens of the seven future-focused teaching capabilities from the Engineering 2035 Project using a two-stage coding process. Stage 1 took a general approach whereby a selection criterion was coded as aligning to a teaching capability if it was explicitly required, or if it could assumed that the capability would be a prerequisite to demonstrating the criterion. Stage 2 focused on identifying where the capabilities were explicitly referenced in a teaching context for each selection criterion. OUTCOMES: The analysis demonstrated that current university recruitment strategies are not well aligned with the future-focused teaching capabilities highlighted by the Engineering 2035 Project. Many capabilities were overwhelmingly expressed in selection criteria only through general statements or in relation to research, rather than in teaching-specific contexts. This finding implies that current practices are leaving a significant gap in the recruitment of staff with strong skills in translating knowledge of the engineering profession into educational practice. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the findings of the study suggest that dramatic structural and systematic changes are needed in how engineering academics are recruited. In particular, universities need to rethink how they craft and prioritise selection criteria if they are to effectively recruit engineering academics with the future-focused teaching capabilities necessary to deliver the envisioned high-quality engineering graduates of the future.