Emerging professional skills: Insights and methods

Abstract

In this workshop run by the Engineering skills SIG, attendees were given the opportunity to learn about emerging professional competencies, and strategies to overcome teaching barriers.The workshop format was “world cafe” with several tables for small groups to informally discuss these strategies within a time limit. Each table focussed on an emerging skill and/or scenario and participants each visited several tables. The session was informed by the engineering skills survey taken by SEFI 2021 conference attendees. It gave us views on new competencies, barriers to teaching them, and illustrations of good practice. Obstacles to teaching them include motivation, legitimacy, overloaded curriculums, student resistance, resource constraints, and pedagogical understandings.Ideally skills should be learned by students in contexts where they’re used. While many technical competencies are primarily developed in engineering practice, professional/soft abilities are often not. As a result, there ought to be some opportunity for the student to transfer, adapt and (re)learn them in an engineering degree. This report summarises the conference workshop outputs with sections for each table. Each section acknowledges the hosts/authors, a summary of the discussion, and any materials presented. Readers may find this paper useful when facilitating related discussions.