GLOBAL COMPETENCE NEEDS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF STAKEHOLDERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Upon graduation, engineering graduates will find themselves in diverse, interconnected, and fast-paced work environments. Global competence, which encompasses different types of knowledge, skills and attitudes, is what will help them navigate successfully through the variety of situations they may encounter. Accordingly, its development should be an integrated core aspect of today’s engineering education. Acknowledging the problems with current approaches to doing so – in particular, the vagueness of the concept and the issues of prioritizing learning content in already crowded curricula - this paper compares the perceived need and value of specific competencies according to key stakeholders. Based on a previous literature review, a survey focusing on a set of 15 frequently mentioned competences was developed and distributed internationally. The perspectives of three types of stakeholders - engineering professionals (n=339), educators (n=200), and students (n=331) – were collected and broadly analyzed according to the perceived importance of the competencies. Overall, we found agreement among the stakeholder groups, and the majority of our proposed competences were perceived as either important or very important by the respondents. Among the competences, teamwork and collaboration and English language skills stood out, while other language skills were perceived as less important. Comparing the groups, we found that professionals tended to value several social competences more highly and subject-specific competences less highly than academic stakeholders. In our discussion, we offer possible explanations for these findings, which allow inferences for educational change towards a more globally competent higher engineering education.