Competencies

Photo by Linda Peterson

Phil Hanlon is the Provost of the University of Michigan.  His job requires thinking about the future of higher education, and I recently listened to him reflect on the skills our students will need in the future.   He observes that the last 50 years in the United States have not, when seen the broad sweep of human history, been normal.  Most of us have grown up and been educated in a time of unprecedented prosperity and stability.   All the indicators are that the 21st century will be more volatile, activity will be globally interconnected, organizations will be smaller and more flexible, employees will shift jobs often, and they will have to reinvent themselves many times.  How, in four years, do we prepare students for this uncertainty?

In engineering education for the last 50 years, until very recently, we have focused on “engineering science,” fundamental scientific and mathematical tools that can be applied to the analysis of engineered systems.  More recently there has been increased focus on design and open-ended problem solving.  It’s not enough.

To prepare our students for a lifetime of contribution to solving the uncertain problems of the world, our graduates need to possess:

1. Sophisticated learning skills, because what students learn in college will be woefully inadequate to their subsequent 50 years of active contribution to society.
2. Communication skills, to allow them as engineers to communicate with each other, with clients, and with the broader society they serve.
3. Global and cultural understanding to analyze the human needs and human contexts, and ethical implications, of engineered solutions.
4. Creativity and an entrepreneurial mindset to identify opportunities, create ideas, design solutions, and persist through setbacks.
5. Leadership and project management skills, including ethical tools, to support working in and leading diverse teams for the benefit of diverse clients.
6. Sustainability principles to evaluate the environmental consequences of engineering choices.
7. Fundamental knowledge of a discipline, to give focus to their education and early career work, and a foundation on which to build later disciplinary knowledge.

Traditional engineering education focuses mostly on the last, and most specific of these competencies.  But the broader competencies of the first six are the more generalizable ones, that will support a graduate over many decades of productive life.   These broad skills can be inculcated in a college education, but to master many of these skills requires not lectures, but instead reflection on experiences.

Provost Hanlon believes that we need to provide more active learning experiences for our students.  Experiences like study abroad, service learning, student project work: these activities provide the environment in which teachable moments can arise that allow discovery of the generalizable principles of learning, or effective communication, or of cultural understanding.  The challenge for us as teachers will be to ensure that these teachable moments actually lead to learning.

Acknowledgement: the ideas in this post are built from contributions from many colleagues, most notably Stacie Edington and Phil Hanlon.