Towards Developing a Communication Training Module for Customer-based Projects

The development of project work skills forms the backbone of curricula in engineering education. Engineering students gain valuable work experience, develop interpersonal competences and a “customer-first” mindset, establish a professional network, and experience a smoother transition to the engineering labor market when working in customer-based projects. As university and industry collaboration intensifies, the number of real life customer-based projects increases. Engineering teachers who supervise real life customer-based projects focus primarily on the development of subject competences and the delivery of the project outcomes. Yet, in such projects the development of interpersonal and communication competences remains overlooked or it is assumed to develop through experience and not necessarily through a more systematic training process. The systematic development of interpersonal and communication competences can positively contribute to successful project outcomes in addition to enhancing the engineering students’ overall competitiveness when they graduate. This paper aims to address this need in engineering education in general and more specifically to establish the communication issues and competences that need to be developed when engineering students liaise with customers in projects in the Faculty of Business, ICT, and Chemical Engineering at Turku University of Applied Sciences. The questions this paper aims to answer are: a. What is the context and purpose in which communication between students and project customers occurs? b. What are the current practices and protocols (if any) when students communicate with project customers? c. Which project phases are considered critical for successful communication? d. What are the most challenging communication situations for students, project customers, supervising teachers? e. What are good tips or practices that enhance communication? f. What kind of training activity would be appropriate for developing better communication? The method for answering the above questions will be exploratory qualitative interviews with the three stakeholders, namely, students, supervising teachers, and project customers. The interviewees will include 4 students with a range of experience in projects, 2 students who are in employment and have recently graduated, 3 supervising teachers or staff involved in customer-based projects representing the range of real life projects undertaken by the above mentioned faculty and 3 project customers. The paper will discuss the findings from the interviews and their implications for the development of a communication training module for customer-based projects. The paper will conclude with a list of recommendations for curriculum design. The envisaged significance of these recommendations is expected to be the creation of a compulsory training module as part of Work Placement Guidance in order to help engineering students acquire increased awareness of communication issues as well as tools and strategies for handling such issues in real life customer-based projects.

Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016