Program-level strategic planning for electrical engineering technology programs

Strategic planning is a tool widely used in business, industries and non-profit organizations and has been recently adopted in academia. However, because their own characteristics, the strategic plans in colleges and universities are mostly developed at an institutional level. As these provide an overview of the organization, they cannot be very detailed and may contain a certain amount of ambiguities in order to satisfy its multiple constituencies. At the institutional level there are limited opportunities to include specific strategies that may affect individual academic programs. To solve these limitations, this paper proposes strategic plans being developed and incorporated at the program level, specifically for electrical engineering or electrical engineering technology programs. The appropriate strategic planning results in strengthen these programs and generate useful and significant dialog among their constituencies. The paper finishes by showing a generic strategic plan for an electrical engineering technology program that can nevertheless, be adopted and modified as needed by faculty and academic staff involved in this process of creating a similar plan for their own electrical engineering programs.