Agency for sustainability across the university-to-workplace transition: senior student and early career engineer perspectives from Qatar

Engineers play a central role in achieving sustainability goals, yet a value-action gap appears when graduates move from university into work. This qualitative study compares how senior engineering students (n = 10) and early career engineers (n = 10) in Qatar perceive their agency for sustainability across the university-to-workplace transition, using Bandura’s theory of human agency as an interpretive lens. Thirteen sub-themes emerged from the thematic and cross-group analysis, grouped under these themes: (1) multiple pathways for conceptualising sustainability, which captured four recurring conceptualisations, (2) intrapersonal sources as foundational to agency, and (3) structural and contextual supports and constraints of agency. Together, these findings show that enacting agency for sustainability requires a dynamic interplay between the thinking and being dimensions, which are further mediated by contextual structures that enable or constrain sustained action. This study offers implications for engineering education and early career development for sustainability action across the transition into the workplace.