Identifying career pathways to engineering education research in Australia

Currently there is limited understanding about the academic qualifications (or formal research training) which engineering education researchers possess, and which university departments they primarily reside in. The objective of this study is to capture information on these researcher characteristics via bibliographic analysis of publicly available sources.A list of 104 authors affiliated with Australian institutions who published in at least one of thirteen engineering education journals between 2018–2019 (inclusive) was retrieved. For each author, information about their qualifications and where they worked was compiled from available biographic information in their publications (e.g. often common in IEEE publications), ORCID profile, Scopus profile, the Australian TROVE database, and online university researcher profile. In total, 80 authors held a known PhD; 30 in technical engineering, 12 in engineering education, 3 in education, 21 in other disciplines, and 14 not specified. Of the 67 with known bachelor degrees, 69% were in engineering, the remainder widely varied. 92 authors worked in a university; 56 in engineering faculty, 9 in computing faculty, 13 in other faculty, 9 in teaching and learning departments, 4 in other capacities at a university. 4 authors did not work at a university.Our findings show that while a minority of engineering education researchers hold technical engineering PhD degrees, PhD theses on engineering education topics are becoming more widespread and we can predict a growing community of Australian engineering researchers. These data can assist with planning strategies for further increasing engagement with engineering education research in the Australian context.