Professional Competencies

The need to include so-called generic, cross-disciplinary or transferable skills and competencies in the learning outcomes of higher education students is not only included in European Higher Education Area directives but has also been acknowledged in several other frameworks around the world since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although universities have had extensive experience in developing students’ domain-specific competencies, fostering professional competencies poses a new challenge that we need to face.

Professional Competencies includes the study of how to effectively include personal, interpersonal and specific engineering-profession competencies (such as communication, teamwork, user awareness and entrepreneurship) in engineering curricula. The Professional Competencies track includes different approaches to defining, implementing and measuring the effectiveness of professional competencies teaching methods. The methods include competency maps, adaptation of sets of skills (such as CDIO), skill-specific courses, integrated-curricula and basic science and discipline-specific courses, context-oriented courses such as design-build-test projects, product-development and multidisciplinary courses, use of active learning methodologies, design of skill assessment methods and measurement of learning outcomes at the curriculum level.