Exploring Motivations For Engineers Without Borders- USA

With its rapid growth and near gender balance, Engineers Without Borders (EWB-USA) represents a model that the engineering field is striving towards. Understanding the motivations for members’ involvement and how it impacts their involvement with engineering can offer insight for how project-based organizations can influence recruitment and retention in the larger field. Using qualitative data, this research aimed to explore the motivations for EWB-USA involvement and for engineering involvement, and it compared how these motivations differed by organizational membership and gender. One hundred sixty-five engineers took part in the interviews and focus groups, representing a mix of males, females, professionals, and students from across the United States. Transcriptions were coded for motivations based on emergent themes and relative frequencies and patterns were reported. Trends showed that EWB-USA members were uniquely motivated by less-traditional engineering motivations than engineers not involved with the organization, and that the EWB-USA females, in particular, showed less traditional engineering motivations than the males. The findings also highlighted four ways in which EWB-USA impacts engineering motivations, which suggest that other project-based engineering organizations can leverage their unique position in the engineering field to help aid recruitment and retention of atypical engineers.