In developing its new engineering accreditation criteria, ABET reaffirmed a set of “hard” engineering skills while introducing a second, equally important, set of six “professional” skills. These latter skills include communication, teamwork, and understanding ethics and professionalism, which we label process skills, and engineering within a global and societal context, lifelong learning, and a knowledge of contemporary issues, which we designate as awareness skills. We review these skills with an emphasis on how they can be taught, or more correctly learned, citing a number of examples of successful and/or promising implementations. We then examine the difficult issue of assessing these skills. We are very positive about a number of creative ways that these skills are being learned, particularly at institutions that are turning to global and/or service learning in combination with engineering design projects to teach and reinforce outcome combinations. We are also encouraged by work directed at assessing these skills, but recognize that there is considerable research that remains to be done.

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The ABET “Professional Skills” — Can They Be Taught? Can They Be Assessed?

This paper offers and tests an approach to conceptualizing the global competency of engineers. It begins by showing that the often-stated goal of working effectively with different cultures is fundamentally about learning to work effectively with people who define problems differently. The paper offers a minimum learning criterion for global competency and three learning outcomes whose achievement can help engineering students fulfill that criterion. It uses the criterion to establish a typology of established methods to support global learning for engineering students. It introduces the course, Engineering Cultures, as an example of an integrated classroom experience designed to enable larger numbers of engineering students to take the critical first step toward global competency, and it offers a test application of the learning criterion and outcomes by using them to organize summative assessments of student learning in the course.

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The Globally Competent Engineer: Working Effectively with People Who Define Problems Differently

Engineering curricula are increasingly focused on developing student competencies. Many new competencies needed by engineers today are professional skills (sometimes called the ‘soft skills’). Among the new competencies for engineering graduates is global competence, the ability to work knowledgeably and live comfortably in a transnational engineering environment and global society. While there is broad agreement within the engineering community for the need to better prepare engineers for global practice, there is much less agreement as to what skills and abilities define global competence, what combination and duration of international education and experiences best instil it and what means and metrics should be used to judge whether students have attained it. This paper presents a conceptual model to define global competence, a curriculum model for instilling it and an assessment model to determine if graduates have attained it. It concludes with a description of a quasi-experimental research effort no...

Defining, developing and assessing global competence in engineers

Can Diversity in the Undergraduate Engineering Population BE Enhanced Through Curricular Change

Recent studies emphasize the needs of a wider set of skills engineers require than ever thought. In this paper, authors report on a systematic literature review on this issue. Findings of the review are spanned over two main folds: 1- A conceptual ontological framework of engineering skills in the context of generic- and employability- skills of KBS and KBEs citizens and workforce, and 2- A global set of 24 mutual common skills, but different in topology, between engineering and generic competencies. The work outlined in this paper is probably one of the most comprehensive and wide scan of literature on the required talent and skills of current and future engineers.

Skills of engineers in knowledge based economies: A comprehensive literature review, and model development

At an ASME panel on manufacturing engineering education, industry representatives emphasized preparation for globalization. The concept has not yet had widespread impact on undergraduate engineering curricula. In this paper the industry updates are summarized, especially as they pertain to undergraduate engineering education for a globalized economy, and synthesized with the literature on the subject. Objectives for manufacturing engineering education are derived and possible ways of introducing the subject into an undergraduate curriculum without lengthening the program are suggested. The findings should be applicable to manufacturing, mechanical, and industrial engineering.

Spencer Barnes

Papers

Globalization and the Undergraduate Manufacturing Engineering Curriculum

On the Use of Narrative Structure and Encapsulation for Health-related Stories Contained Within Digital News Packages