Abstract: Within European Higher Education a main goal in the Bologna process is to enhance the students’ employability. In a longitudinal study in Linkoping, four cohorts of students have been monitored through their whole study period of 4.5 years with a follow up one year after graduation. The curriculum has been changed, in line with the Dublin descriptors. Within a pedagogical framework CDIO (conceive, design, implement, operate) a curriculum was designed that included project courses in the first, third and fourth year. The first cohort (1998) studied within a traditional curriculum, the second (1999) had a CDIO project course in their third year, the third (2000) had a CDIO project course in their third and fourth year and the fourth (2002) had a project course in their first, third and fourth year, a full CDIO curriculum. In Sweden, as well as in other European countries, there are increasing difficulties for young adults to get into the regular job market and this also influence the overall graduate job market, but engineers are one exception. In 2007 the unemployment rate is below 0,5. The paradox is that in spite of that, the enrolment rates are declining, especially in science and engineering programmes. Reviews of research on the transition from Higher Education to work point to the difficulties in assessing graduate employment (Teichler, 1997; 1999; Rose, 2005; Clarke & Winch, 2006;Smetherham, 2006, Atkins, 1999) but many key actors agree on the fact that HE institutions must focus more on making the students employable, to pay more attention to train their generic competencies, prepare them for a globalised job market and for indeterminate future job tasks, new employment patterns and contributions to innovation in society. These conclusion imply that students can learn how to be employable. In this paper the focus will be on how graduate students construct, deconstruct and reconstruct their image of what it means to be a student in engineering and becoming an engineer during their study period. Questions to be asked are How do students construct their professional identity as students and as graduate engineers at the beginning of their studies, at different stages of their studies and after graduation? Are these constructions related to their approaches to learning and to their experiences of the study environment and job markets?

25 students who have completed their education are included in this paper, in all about 100 interviews. In this paper the focus is on how these students construct, deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of “being a student of engineering” and of “becoming an engineer”. Using a phenomenological hermeneutical method for researching lived experiences (Lindseth & Norberg, 2004) the interviews will be interpreted in relation to the study context and the social-cultural context of engineering education and job market.

Previous results from our longitudinal study show that the attitude towards the future, to studies and work, differ between the cohorts (Edvardsson Stiwne, 2006; 2007).