Multiple Vantage Points for Employent-related Feedback

Perhaps the most important goal of any engineering program that seeks to gather employer and alumni feedback is to get a clear picture of the work performance strengths and weaknesses of an institution's graduates. A basic problem in such assessment concerns the variety of data sources and types of feedback used. Different data sources have different bias characteristics, so that depending on only one or two sources has the risk of compromising reliability and validity. Supported in part by SUCCEED Coalition funding to the Georgia Institute of Technology, we are addressing issues of gathering and interpretation of data from employers and recruiters by means of a comprehensive and longitudinal approach involving several sources. A description of this ongoing effort, methodological concerns, and some of the results obtained will be the foci of this paper. Index Terms – Employer feedback, assessment, measurement, survey research, reliability and validity