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Abstract Abstract To meet the challenges and opportunities of educating new generations of engineering leaders for jobs of the future, Engineering Management programs must evolve with a strategy that integrates academic education with workplace application. That strategy must address the changing demographics of technical industries and their workforces. We can meet that challenge by unifying technical leadership fundamentals into an applied experience, internalizing engineering management coursework with a real-life technical leadership scenario that is applicable across industries. Education research1 shows that working professional students learn best through case studies, active learning, and project-based activity. This paper describes how the Johns Hopkins part-time Master of Engineering Management program builds on this approach by recruiting faculty who are senior executives from industry. These faculty apply their experience to drive nuanced critical thinking in a team-based real-world scenario. The paper further describes the course evolution from its first offering in 2015 by adapting specific adult-learning techniques such as retrieval practice, problem solving, critical thinking, cross-discipline collaboration, and relevance to working professional careers. In this capstone course we take this approach to another level by inviting practicing senior executives from industry and government to role play a board of directors in a strategic, global investment scenario. Students acting in the roles of senior technical executives present a technical strategy and implementation plan where they assess the wants/needs of customers, the company's technical competitive position, make-buy choices, acquisition of critical technology, and technical organization integration to meet the company's strategy that evolves over the fourteen-week semester. The visiting senior executives then become the students' mentors, evaluators, and coaches for a day long experience of "walking in the shoes of senior technical executives". Capstone Day concludes with a visiting executive roundtable. This paper describes how this course, as part of the Johns Hopkins Master of Engineering Management, integrates critical EM topics through the lens of the technical executive. It addresses leadership and organizational management, strategic planning, financial resource management, project management, make-buy supply chain management, management of technology, etc. In addition, this paper touches on how this course connects with our MEM program organization, outcome assessment, and program/course effectiveness. It simulates workplace application of engineering management skills and concepts with educational implications (including academic and industry collaboration). The instructors integrate their engineering management education success stories, innovative teaching practices, and combined asynchronous and synchronous learning networks with industry diversity. This course was first described at the ASEE National Conference, June 2016. Today's paper also addresses how the course has evolved responding to student feedback, changing student demographics, and MEM program restructuring.
Blank et al. (Sun,) studied this question.