Board 324: Intelligently Preparing the Future Construction Engineering Workforce by Connecting the Professional and Educational Communities

The purpose of this project is to investigate the development of a framework for Connecting the Professional and Educational Communities (ConPEC). This aims to improve the accessibility of construction industry practitioners to instructors and ensure more significant interaction of students with their communities of practice (COP). The project will determine users' learning-driven preferences and develop many-to-many matching algorithms. Users will evaluate the ConPEC platform, and the matching algorithms will be improved to ensure enhanced equitable matching. The project will investigate the ConPEC platform's influence on students' disciplined perception and professional identity development. Substantive theories would be developed to explain how improved accessibility, enabled by the ConPEC framework, improves the disciplined perception and professional identity development of construction engineering students. In addition to improved accessibility to construction COP, this project would contribute to the diversity of the nation's construction workforce and strengthen diverse forms of industry-academia interactions. Also, the platform, developed theories, and algorithms can be adapted by high schools, community colleges, and researchers to develop other technological solutions to enhance the development of students in various disciplines. The deployment of ConPEC will also produce diverse datasets for engineering education researchers, institutions, and policymakers. These data include concentration areas, current and future directions of the industry, and the extent to which institutions are preparing students to meet the demands of the industry. ConPEC will also facilitate industries' supply chain through apprenticeship programs and talent pipelines that are currently fragmented.