Providing the Team Experience to Human Factors and Ergonomics Students

The importance of the team experience to human factors and ergonomics students is discussed. Three faculty members describe different approaches to providing the team experience. Van Cott and Huey (1992) provided a detailed examination of the education and utilization of human factors specialists in a report to the National Research Council. They reported frequent interaction between both human factors and ergonomics (HF&E) personnel, and specialists from other areas including: computer programming, engineering, marketing, systems analysis and system users. Some of this interaction occurs as members of a team. This requirement was repeated in Science by Kaiser (1995) "But today in industry, Ph.D.s need to be ready to learn new disciplines, work in teams, explain their research to non-specialists, and understand the business impact of their work (p 133). " While Kaiser's comments are focused specifically on the Ph.D., the emphasis extends to HF&E professionals at all academic levels. Borchardt (1996) also emphasizes the importance of a team-orientation in engineering. Shapiro (1994), speaking specifically to the HF&E community, is very direct when he states simply "teamwork is survival." The ability to work as a team member appeared repeatedly as a requirement, at all levels and across industry, government / military and consulting positions, in the placement positions analyzed by Moroney and Adams (1996), and among the internship positions analyzed by Moroney, Sotile, and Blinn, (1996). The sections which follow describe teamwork experiences provided by three educators, who represent the areas of industrial engineering, psychology and industrial and operations engineering. The final paper in this symposium (Stone, 1996) reviews the literature on team dynamic