What Engineers Actually Say: A Qualitative Analysis of Workplace Pressure in a Global Engineering Survey

Abstract

Quantitative survey instruments constrain responses to researcher-defined categories, risking omission of emergent pressures and the relational texture through which they are experienced. This paper reports a qualitative analysis of open-text responses from a global engineering workplace survey (N = 335), providing a ground-level account of how engineering professionals describe workplace pressure in their own words. Of 335 respondents, 187 provided substantive responses (55.8%), yielding 180 codeable entries after exclusion of seven uninformative responses. A five-theme, 23-code framework was developed through an abductive process: initial open coding was conducted inductively and subsequently refined through comparison with established literature on engineering workplace pressure. Code frequency and co-occurrence patterns were analysed, and inter-rater reliability was assessed using Cohen’s kappa on a randomly selected subsample (n = 35, κ = 0.836), indicating good agreement.

Schedule compression (S1, 18.9%) was the most frequently coded pressure, followed by positive or protective experiences (PPF, 13.9%), resource shortage (S4, 13.3%), workload excess (C4, 13.3%), and health and well-being impact (C5, 10.6%). Five thematic clusters emerged: Structural and Systemic Pressures, Professional Identity and Recognition, Interpersonal and Cultural Pressures, Consequences and Outcomes, and Positive and Protective Factors. The qualitative responses extend and contextualise quantitative findings, revealing informal pressure mechanisms, unrecorded labour, and the coexistence of high engagement with structural difficulty that structured survey items alone do not capture. The findings identify informal pressure mechanisms—unrecorded hours, unofficial instruction channels, and hierarchy override—that fall outside standard survey instruments and represent governance gaps with implications for engineering workforce management and safety culture. This study provides one of the few large-scale qualitative analyses of open-text workplace pressure descriptions in engineering and offers a structured analytical framework for future mixed-methods investigations.