Refining a taxonomy and lexicon for continuing engineering education

An effective and current Continuing Engineering Education (CEE) ecosystem is vital to support the millions of practising engineers globally. CEE is considered as education of an engineer, technologist or technician after their initial educational phase (Uhomoibhi & Ross 2019). However, previous work has identified (Gomez Puente et al. 2023) the need for a shared lexicon around practices in CEE to allow better knowledge sharing that would enable a faster and more effective diffusion and adoption of concepts.

A taxonomy offers such a shared lexicon is a “hierarchical classification system that makes categorising or finding terms within text easier” (Pack 2002) and one that involves a clear vocabulary. Previously there was no taxonomy aligned specifically to CEE, which led to a creation of an initial taxonomy for CEE (Caratozzolo et al. 2024) to align CEE concepts and their implementation. Methodologically, this initial taxonomy was developed from an inductive analysis of eight case studies (Gomez Puente 2023) and then refined and combined with a scoping review of literature (Caratozzolo et al. 2024). Such a methodology aligns with an empirical (a posteriori approach) to taxonomy development (Bailey 1994) and allows sequential inductive and deductive consideration of the emerging terms and their structure. In line with the approach of Finelli et al (2015), then this taxonomy benefits from an iterative refinement, particularly from experts within the field, and this workshop is intended to contribute a further stage of refinement from a broader sample

The workshop reviewed this initial taxonomy with the SEFI CEE expert community to refine further.