UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

ASEE Prism, Mar 2005 by Daniel, Alice L

ENGINEERS SEEKING TO MOVE UP THE CAREER LADDER ARE GETTING MASTER'S DEGREES IN ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT.

With his electrical engineering degree in hand, Erik Neff went to work for a major software company in the late 1990s and had the kind of experience that can derail a career. The product he helped develop, a program that would proactively manage and monitor customers' computer systems, was technically brilliant but received very little business scrutiny before it was marketed. "We didn't take into consideration a number of customer needs," Neff says. "Security was a big problem. As an entry-level engineer, I did my job. But in hindsight, I see the problems very clearly."

In part, the dot-coin boom was responsible for the lack of business insight within the company. "People were being hired right and left and not necessarily with the right skills," Neff says. But at the same time, Neff realized he needed more exposure to technology's business side if he wanted to climb the management ladder. He opted to return to school and get a degree that would give him business skills within a technical setting: a master's in engineering management (M.E.M.).

Like Neff, a growing number of engineers are choosing to complement their technical skills with business training. In the last decade, that number has accounted for a major increase in the number of American colleges and universities offering master's degrees in engineering management. In 2002, 269 schools offered management degrees, a 69 percent increase from 1994, according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in New York.

More degree programs are being offered because the demand is there from engineering students, says Robert Graves, co-director of the M.E.M. program at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. Some of these students have gone into engineering because they're good at math and science, but as they continue their shidics, they realize they don't want to take a straight and more narrowly-focused doctoral engineering path. Graves says. Instead, they prefer to start their own company or take on leadership and management responsibilities relatively early in their careers.

In addition, accreditation requirements have resulted in a strong technical focus in the undergraduate curriculum, which means fewer business-related classes for undergraduates. If students want to pursue finance, business, and law-related classes, they need to consider a master's program.

Christine Schoaff chose to get an M.E.M. at Dartmouth because she wanted to start her own company, Endless Loop Software. "The degree has been useful because it allowed me to run a company and understand the basics of product management, project management, and engineering and business. It basically helped me make engineering profitable," she says. While a college graduate usually needs experience before going back to get an M.B.A., the M.E.M. programs are targeted at such early-career engineers.

Just as students are demanding more business skills, companies are also looking for employees with both technical expertise and management abilities "It's getting rarer and rarer for a college graduate to walk out of an institution and sit in a cubicle designing widgets in isolation," says Brad Fox, executive director of the M.E.M. program in the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. "Engineers can't work in a vacuum anymore. They have to interact with business." Some technology-driven companies will "effectively grow their own engineering experts," according to Graves. But other companies are more strategic in recruiting engineering graduates who also have a highly developed sense of marketing, finance, and organizational behavior. "They should be able to communicate but also to determine when an elegant engineering solution may be far too expensive and the less elegant but more economical approach makes more sense," Graves says.

Fox says the increase in management degrees is driven by two factors: globalization and the speed of communication in today's marketplace. "In the past, innovations might take years to implement, but today's companies are required to innovate much more quickly and communicate that innovation much more effectively," he says. "Globalization drives the need to understand both business and engineering." As products such as microprocessors become more and more sophisticated, marketing departments need to become more technically savvy, he says.

In light of these factors, University of Southern California (USC) engineering dean C.L. Max Nikias has moved aggressively to design a new M.E.M. program in the Viterbi School of Engineering. "Technology innovation is going to be a major driver of economic development in the near future," he says. "Part of my ambition as dean is to position the school to capture this new wave of opportunity." Most of the 99 students enrolled in the M.E.M. program take the courses online through the school's Distance Education Network, the largest E-learning engineering graduate program in the country.