Perspectives on Engineering Competencies and Competency Development Approaches - Early-Career Engineers versus Managers of Engineers

It has been claimed that a better understanding of the needs of engineering practice is necessary in order to improve students' preparedness for engineering work. The fourfold purpose of this study is to compare perspectives on engineering competencies between early-career engineers and managers of engineers in leadership positions regarding, importance, satisfaction, contribution of Project Based Learning (PBL) and contribution of traditional learning. Based on a set of sixteen engineering competencies, questionnaire based interviews are carried out resulting in usable responses from 92 managers of engineers and 67 early-career engineers. Fuzzy TOPSIS analysis is applied. Results show that engineering educators should give more importance to competencies related to professional and personal attributes. Furthermore, students should be exposed more often to a larger variety of real life problems, and PBL should be the primary learning approach for 12 of the 16 analysed competencies.