A Strategy for Integrating Professional Skills Development into a Manufacturing Engineering Curriculum

Workplace skills development are an important though often an indirect outcome of Engineering curriculums. These skills are critical to successful careers in job environments where graduates must increasingly navigate the challenges of adaptation to new technologies and the ability to work within teams containing a broad diversity of technical and personal backgrounds and goals. These skills include what is often referred to as the “Professional” or “soft skills” such as the ability to communicate effectively, an appreciation of an engineer’s “duty of care” to society and a disposition towards self-learning. However, they also include many that are more technical in nature including the ability to visualize in 3D, troubleshooting, quantifying and mitigating risk and connecting cause and effect. These are typically lumped together as skills that support problem solving abilities. This paper presents a strategy being developed for emphasizing skills development within a Manufacturing Engineering curriculum. It recognizes that some of these lumped skills of a more technical nature can get overlooked or do not receive explicit recognition when they are being practiced. This can contribute to a lack of appreciation for these by students, who overwhelmed by the details of problem solving or applying a technology are unaware that this skill is being practiced. 29 skills have been identified, vetted by the program’s Industrial Advisory Committee and grouped into areas of Problem Solving , Communication and Collaboration , Manage and Act Professionally and Practice Lifelong Learning . Students are introduced to this skill set through a mapping between them and course outcomes that is discussed at the beginning of a course of study. A survey is then used at the end of the course to gage how students felt the targeted skills were enhanced through course activities. This helps to engage students as partners in development of these skills and as this strategy is advanced, it provides valuable feedback to the program as to whether the skill set being used is the most appropriate. The impact on faculty as they shape course experiences to integrate in awareness of the use of these skills will also be discussed.