Knowledge Collaboration: A Success Factor in Developing Structural Engineering Experts

Today's global work environment and social media technologies offer more interactions among experts, team members, partners, and clients across physical boundaries. Although literature suggests that knowledge collaboration is the key to successful expertise development, due to globalization, the more complex work environments impose challenges in such behavior. Understanding those challenges and factors that lead to successful knowledge collaboration and expertise development is critical to company or organization leaders seeking to implement effective knowledge collaboration programs to develop the future structural engineers. The qualitative case study results suggest that internal knowledge collaboration and external knowledge collaboration tend to positively influence expertise development of structural engineers. Readers will learn about (1) the barriers that prevent knowledge collaboration in a global work environment, (2) the enablers that encourage the future structural engineers to explore their areas of interest and pursue deeper into those areas, and (3) implications for companies to develop knowledge collaboration strategies.