۱- Introduction

۲- Career satisfaction: conceptual background and importance

۳- Research hypotheses

۴- Methodology

۵- Results

۶- Discussion

۷- Implications for engineering management

۸-Limitations and future research

References

Abstract

Managing engineering professionals is critical if organizations wish to retain talented employees. Enhancing engineers’ career satisfaction through work, personal and cultural conditions is a fundamental tool to address their aspirations and increasing performance. This empirical research examines all this with data from 846 Spanish engineers. With a hierarchical regression analysis, the results show that organizational commitment, level of income, suitability for the job, and work-life balance supporting culture improve engineers’ career satisfaction. Organizational commitment is the most important issue. Level of income and suitability for the job are the second most important factors for determining men’s and women’s career satisfaction.

Introduction

In today’s competitive, complex and global environment, engineers play a key role in all phases of new knowledge creation and innovation processes. The importance of Engineering is increasing in the global world,1 particularly in high-tech corporations. Therefore, managing engineering professionals is critical. Simultaneously, organizations require a flexible workforce with competent and talented employees to adjust to a changing environment. Managing engineers’ professional and personal capabilities is quite important, as well as their entrepreneurial roles and managerial competences, to improve organizational performance. Engineers are, therefore, considered a strategic asset for their employers, and a carefully monitored workforce (Mignonac and Herrbach, 2003). As good, talented competent professionals are scarce and of strategic importance, organizations (and their managers) may consider it critical to keep them in the organization by considering some professional, personal and cultural conditions. Furthermore, engineers currently face a very high diversity of career prospects (Igbaria et al., 1999), such as technical, manager, project, technical transfer and entrepreneurial orientations (Kim and Cha, 2000). Since companies require the right mix of people and skills at appropriate levels, organizations must provide career paths that retain and motivate workers by finding matches between organizational and individuals’ needs (Igbaria et al., 1999). The increase in both flattening corporate hierarchies and the number of engineering professionals diminishes engineers’ opportunities to reach higher management positions. Internal mobility is thus an important tool for retaining experienced and skilled expert employees to avoid corporate uncertainty and to cut adaptation costs (Mignonac and Herrbach, 2003). Engineers’ traditional career development has, therefore, changed drastically, and the transition to management as the only means toward a successful career has significantly reduced. In these circumstances, corporations manage a large group of engineers without being able to guarantee them traditional career paths. When considering the new specific socio-demographic and psychological trends (Dries, 2013), career satisfaction is an important tool for dealing with this situation. Career satisfaction is a perception that is affected by work, personal and cultural factors if we consider that the time and energy spent on family/personal roles limits availability for work roles, and vice versa. It is, therefore, essential that these organizations identify the current aspects that influence engineers’ career satisfaction.