Working life relevance of sustainability-oriented engineering education and graduates’ influencing possibilities – insights from Finnish employers

Engineering graduates can be important catalysts for societal sustainability transformation. Integrative and transformative response strategies for engineering curricula have been proposed to enhance the required graduate sustainability competencies. Less is known about the working life perceptions of such competencies and whether graduates have opportunities to act for sustainability in their workplaces. We employed a mixed-methods approach to explore employers’ views on graduates’ competencies, performance, and possibilities to influence sustainability in the workplace. The results indicate that graduates are expected to apply sustainability independently to their work. Furthermore, the results underscore the importance of promoting employability, sustainability, and future skills competencies in engineering education, with an emphasis on agency and the motivational and value-related aspects of sustainability. Overall, the findings encourage the application of contextualised and transformative pedagogical approaches in cooperation with working-life actors to ensure that the sustainability contributions of engineering graduates are supported by their education and workplaces.