A strategic blueprint for the alignment of doctoral competencies with disciplinary expectations

Improvement of doctoral education results from strong alignment of educational requirements with disciplinary expectations. This article reports on a qualitative study of 40 Ph.D. holding engineers working in academic and industry careers conducted through interview methods and constant comparative coding of transcripts, operationalizing Golde and Walker's Stewardship framework and making recommendations for doctoral engineering education. Findings indicate that engineering Ph.D. holders across both industry and academia participate in each of the three tenets of stewardship (i.e., generation, conservation, and transformation) in different ways. As such, we propose a new way to plan and to assess graduate student competencies that can be easily integrated into doctoral engineering programs.