Paper ID #42596Integrating Soft Skills into Technical CurriculumDr. Arif Sirinterlikci, Robert Morris University Dr. Arif Sirinterlikci, Ph.D., CMfgE is a University Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering in the School of Engineering, Mathematics, and Science (SEMS) at Robert Morris University (RMU). He holds BS/MS degrees (both in Mechanical Engineering) from Istanbul Technical University in Turkey, and his Ph.D. is in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Ohio State University. He was involved in the ASEE Organization in the years between 2003 to 2011 as a Manufacturing Division Officer, also
Master's Engineering Management ProgramAbstractMany graduates with strong engineering management skills enter the workforce, yet they oftenlack the soft skills our industry needs. Middle Tennessee State University's (MTSU) Master ofScience in Professional Science (MSPS) program in Engineering Management has incorporatedthese desired soft skills into its core curriculum. This cross-disciplinary program providesMiddle Tennessee with the best-educated and well-trained scientific workforce. The program wasawarded the U.S. Department of Education's Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need(GAANN) grant for Engineering Management (2019-2022), which supported nine students witha stipend, full tuition, and fees.In 2023, the MSPS program completed a
. Further, summer camps offer students exceptional opportunities to engage inlearning experiences, explore advanced technologies, establish meaningful connections with like-minded peers, and better understand future career choices. Therefore, given the benefits ofintervention via summer camps and the lack of research in the identified geographical region, thisresearch aimed to determine the impacts of summer camps developed on a previously publishedframework to determine if the intervention enhanced the participant's STEM and soft skills,knowledge, future career, and educational choices of female students from R-ISD. Theparticipating students were subjected to a pre-test to determine the baseline at the beginning of thesummer camp. A post-test was
non-technical soft skills to producethe desired project outcomes. The Project Management Institute's Standard for ProjectManagement in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK ®) Guide – SeventhEdition includes 12 principles to guide the behaviors of project practitioners toward successfulproject deliveries that create value. Introducing the project management principles to engineeringstudents will enhance their career skills by guiding the behaviors in future project environments.This one-week module was created to better equip engineering students with projectmanagement competencies within an undergraduate three-credit hour project management careerskills course. The module includes a lecture on the 12 guiding principles from the
clips on topics related to life after graduation andnavigating early career issues; the videos range from slightly over one minute to six and a halfminutes. The total time of the videos is under forty-two minutes.The videos present a variety of alumni speakers and deliver content on a range of areas ofstudent curiosity. The video topics include: 1) trying out different things; 2) making use ofresources; 3) what to look for in a job; 4) internships and growth opportunities; 5) networking; 6)does a dream job exist?; 7) tackling problems at work; 8) beyond the technical: soft skills; 9)work-life balance; 10) career pivots; 11) women in engineering; and 12) diversity in theworkplace (see Figure 1). Most videos feature more than one speaker. The
students were referring to was not clear it was kept as a separate code under communication ratherthan coded as interpersonal or written communication. Also, students would occasionally include the termprofessional or “soft” skills to refer to all of the skills. These instances were coded as “General.”FindingsParticipants contributed a myriad of professional skills to each activity system category. The objectivecategory contained the most skills at 18, followed by work division (14), team members (11), tools (10),rules (9), and community (6) as shown in Table I. The numbers in the table represent the number ofdiagrams where students had written the skill in connection with a specific activity system category. Thenumbers are only used to represent
-lish laboratories and curricula that are not only in sync with current industry requirements butare also adaptive enough to accommodate future advancements.Adoption and implementation of the presented tools will ensure that the next generation ofSTEM workers displays a blend of technical skills, soft skills, and digital capabilities neededdue to rapid technological advancements and constantly changing work environments of thesemiconductor industry.INTRODUCTIONThe teaching-learning landscape has undergone swift changes, spurred by the pandemic, lead-ing to the rise of virtual learning, new semiconductor global initiatives, and the advent of Indus-try 5.0. As Stuchlikova [13] predicts, knowledge gained during a degree may become outdatedby the
prompt, with a few providing only a briefsentence.Student responses were coded into four theme areas, including the engineering design process(EDP), soft skills, tools, and applications. Within these theme areas, more specific topics wereidentified. The EDP theme includes general mention of the EDP, as well as more specificcomponents such as iteration, prototyping and testing, and gathering information. Under theumbrella of soft skills, topics include teamwork, communication, and time management. Studentresponses also contained mentions of specific tools that were taught over the course of thesemester, and these fell into the categories of organizational tools and CAD modeling. Finally,the theme area of applications was broken into the two areas
of this report is to: 1. Summarize findings of all barriers with teaching Industry 4.0hard and soft skills through conducted desk research, faculty interviews, discussion with theAccreditation Board of Education of Technology (ABET), and feedback received from faculty atthe 2023 Autodesk Educator Summer Summit. 2. Provide a step-by-step approach toimplementing an Industry 4.0 curriculum in the classroom, and 3. Provide a recommendation ofthe curriculum and specific content that should be taught and implemented in mechanical andmanufacturing engineering programs.Reducing Time to TalentIndustry-related research reports that there is a need to reduce time to talent. Time to talent isdefined as the time an entry-level employee joins an
complex challenges in their professional context that requireboth technical and social competencies and include providing clean water, the ethics ofdeveloping AI, engineering better delivery of medication, and preventing nuclear terror [1]. Toeffectively solve these complex problems, engineers have to rigorously and adeptly applytechnical skills and soft skills such as communication, collaboration, and empathy [2]. Soft skillsare widely recognized as having increasing importance for employment, career success, andprofessional and personal satisfaction in modern engineering workplaces [3].Empathy is a critical soft skill, focused on building emotional intelligence [2], [4], [5], [6], andhas many definitions in the literature [7]. This work is
their graduatestudent/post-doc mentors. Part I presented interns with difficult STEM lab-specific communication scenariosand served as prompts for individual, and then small group brainstorming. Ideas were shared out with the wholegroup and discussed. In part 2, each grad student/post-doc mentor was told to deliver a scenario to 2-3 internswho could then work together to develop a response. Table 1 in the Appendix lists the small groups scenariosand the soft skills the reasoning for their inclusion. This communication workshop was designed to not onlyoffer communication skill-building for the interns, but also to provide grad student/post-doc mentors withinsights for future interactions with their PROPEL interns.PROPEL Program Evaluation - The
academically gifted, low-income Black students to earnCS degrees in four years and pursue careers in the field of CS. In the spring of 2023, wesuccessfully recruited and retained the first cohort of six talented students (i.e., S-STEM scholars).In the fall of 2023, we recruited a second cohort of five students.Throughout the past year, we provided a series of mentoring and professional developmentopportunities to the S-STEM scholars, fostering their personal and professional growth. Some ofthese opportunities were extended to the entire university to maximize the program’s impact. Keyactivities included career mentoring, technical skill development (specifically in Pythonprogramming), soft skill development, undergraduate research, and high school
Universidade de S˜ao Paulo. Professor of Physics at Mau´a Institute of Technology, since 1994 and President of Teacher’s Academy at the same Institution. ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2024 Development of Modeling and Communication Skills through a Project- Based Learning Approach in the Physics Laboratory.This evidence-based practice paper aims to analyze the development of physics modelingcompetences and soft skills among second-year students in Engineering courses. The mainobjective is to implement the Project Based Learning (PBL) approach during the ExperimentalPhysics class. The students were divided into teams of four members, and each team wasallowed to choose a scientific paper on
current trends in technical communicationfor engineers.Technical Communication Skills in EngineersMany of the studies regarding communication skills of engineers focus on technicalcommunication, or the broad ability of engineers to create, write, and communicate with non-engineering audiences about projects or content. This skill is recognized as a core skill by ABETand academic institutions. 2, 3, 4 Engineering students have also stated this is a critical skill, asrecent research found engineering undergraduate students self-identify the importance of soft-skills, which include empathy, listening, and active collaboration, regardless of their extrinsicfactors of gender and major. 5 First-semester engineering students also state they think
development of soft-skills and attributesvalued by the student and future employers or graduate schools. Mentors will also interact withscholars at CAM activities. They will submit documentation on these activities for assessmentand tracking progress. Faculty mentors also meet annually to discuss and review their efforts.The CAM Project Management Team will also investigate the impact of these mentoring andgroup-based activities on faculty workload. It is noted that each faculty member of the CAMProject Management Team will devote 1 month of his/her 9-month annual contract to thisproject.Peer mentoring is recognized as a best-practice strategy for promoting college student success(Collier, 2017). Undergraduate mentors may provide student-relevant
-dominatedenvironments and pursuing male leadership models. Figure 1. Critical engineering skills for facing challenges and seizing opportunities.Significant disparities become apparent when discussing gaps between industry demands andthe skills possessed by engineering graduates. Previous studies have identified criticaldeficiencies in areas such as effective communication, teamwork, management and decision-making, ethical leadership, and social responsibility within the engineering field. Engineersoften encounter challenges applying these soft skills in dynamic work environments,underscoring the pressing need to address these discrepancies during academic training.The ability to communicate effectively and collaborate in multidisciplinary teams is
mentioned that more guidance and resources were needed to help them to improve their project report, especially on the solution design, safety risk assessment, and cost-benefit analyses, as well as on some non-technical skills, such as writing skills and research methods.In response to student feedback and drawing upon insights from the community cultural wealththeory and the pull learning strategy, the course was redesigned in 2023 fall semester,transitioning to a "student-centered" approach. The lecture topics comprise textbook topics andproject support, as shown in Table 3. Project support includes lectures specifically designed tohelp students with their projects, mainly focusing on soft skills, writing skills, and
, leadership, and conflict resolution, constitutes essential soft skills 1crucial for their future careers (Scott-Ladd & Chan, 2008; Gantasala, 2015; Ostafichuk et al., 2020;Adham, 2023). By gaining experience via team collaboration, students can prepare themselves forfuture collaborative projects in the workplace, helping them navigate multidisciplinary working stylesand contributing to increased motivation (Pardo-Garcia & Barac, 2020). Furthermore, it promotespeer-to-peer learning (Maccabe & Fonseca, 2021), enhancing mutual understanding through sharedefforts (Volkova et al., 2021). Therefore, it is essential for educators to guide and
evaluation plan was informed by best practices in internships [12] andlessons learned from the service learning literature [10]. The plan includes surveys of students'interests, reviews of their journals, evaluation of their solution by the community partner, andstudent learning assessments.Student Understanding of Service LearningIn response to questions about the definition of service learning, students often made aconnection to developing skills in the STEM field. “My definition of service learning is learning soft skills through service, and reflecting upon experiences in service. Service-learning allows for the development of much needed soft skills in STEM fields. I think service learning reminds us of our motivations in
students are generally excited to talk about "what" they're doing in engineering. This helps open up the conversation for us to talk about soft skills. Leading with soft skills can cause them to disengage.” o “In order to engage effectively, it is imperative to plan and prepare a "skeleton" of a lesson plan which enables me to ask the right open ended questions in the correct sequence with follow up questions to supplement. Having an open ended conversation tends to engage the mentees more. Also, I tend to be as objective as possible so the mentees know I am not being judgmental, rather I am providing sound advice that they can choose to use if they believe it will be functional to them. If not, we
Management Curriculum for Workplace Readiness: Developing Students’ Soft Skills,” J. Manag. Educ., vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 80–103, Feb. 2018, doi: 10.1177/1052562917703679.[17] C. G. P. Berdanier, “A hard stop to the term ‘soft skills,’” J. Eng. Educ., vol. 111, no. 1, pp. 14–18, 2022, doi: 10.1002/jee.20442.[18] M. Caeiro-Rodríguez et al., “Teaching Soft Skills in Engineering Education: An European Perspective,” IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 29222–29242, 2021, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3059516.[19] N. Y. Madjar, B. Huey, and L. Shor, “Parental Support and Acceptance Determines Women’s Choice of Engineering as a Major,” 2016. doi: 10.18260/p.25852.[20] S. González-Pérez, M. Martínez-Martínez, V. Rey-Paredes, and E. Cifre, “I am done with
further improve teamwork efficacy. Policies shouldalso focus on developing interdisciplinary teams and soft skills. Encouraging engagement withURP alumni as well as the industry can provide current participants with networkingopportunities, career advice, and insights into the long-term benefits of URPs. Finally, researchcan be demanding, therefore, providing mental health support and stress management resourcesfor students participating in URPs can help students maintain a healthy work-life balance.Keywords: undergraduate research, teamwork, collaborative learning, group developmenttheory, engineering education, URP, research program, NSF, REU, Tuckman1. Introduction1.1 Undergraduate Research Programs (URP)Undergraduate Research Programs (URPs
engineering majors and the subsequent careerpathways of students after graduation has gained concern as studies reveal that many engineeringstudents do not continue into engineering careers, despite a global need for them. Decreasedengineering self-efficacy, lack of engineering identity, and low perceived levels of careerpreparedness have all been shown to play a major role in the loss of potential engineers. Topromote more confidence and improve students’ success in engineering careers, many degreeprograms have explored the incorporation of entrepreneurial engagement and the development ofstudents’ “entrepreneurial mindsets”. Entrepreneurship in engineering curriculum promotes thedevelopment of soft skills, business knowledge, and the ability to
framework's impact relied on servicehours, outreach scales, and feedback collected during the summer camps.The analysis confirmed the framework's effectiveness in enhancing students'technical and soft skills, sustaining their interest in STEM, improving teamperformances, and fostering an inclusive community for collaboration. The LPSframework offers students flexibility in developing their skill sets and has beenproven to be sustainable, transformable, and scalable for integration into K-12thengineering curriculum and extracurricular programs.IntroductionRobotics has been identified as an interdisciplinary field encompassing electrical components,computer vision, mechanics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence [1-5]. Innovation inrobotics
extra-curricular activities, are crucial forenhancing students' employability [10]. Regarding preparation programs, Hero suggestsintegrating collaborative projects that simulate real-world industrial collaborations [11], whileWats recommends enhancing students' soft skills, including communication, teamwork,leadership, and problem-solving, through workshops and training programs [12].Additionally, Hu recommends enhancing students’ ability to apply theoretical knowledge toreal-world problems via pre-collaboration research projects and pilot studies [13]. To enhancestudents’ exposure to industrial practices, Burns and Chopra advocate establishing internshipsand cooperative education programs with industry partners, a strategy shown to be
makerspace and university staff should encourage human resourceprofessional in the hiring practices.While recent research (Chambers et al, 2023) has recognized the soft skills and technical skillsstudent staff gain as a result of working in academic makerspaces, hiring processes and practicesshould purposefully include these in the competencies they assess in staff candidates.Given the high turnover of university staff, it is imperative that university staff are involved in thehiring practice to ensure the institutional knowledge is preserved as the space.Finally, while student staff are recognized as important innovators in university makerspaces;ensuring they are equitably hired into inclusive spaces is the responsibility of institutions and
An Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Montclair State University, Dr. Anu co-directs the Software Systems lab at the Center for Computing and Information Science.Stefan A Robila, Montclair State University ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2024K-12 Teachers and Data Science: Learning Interdisciplinary Science through Research ExperiencesAbstract: Data science is now pervasive across STEM, and early exposure and education in itsbasics will be important for the future workforce, academic programs, and scholarly research inengineering, technology, and the formal and natural sciences, and in fact, across the fullspectrum of disciplines. When combined with an emphasis on soft
ingeneral [5], [6]. Student engagement in the classes, and interest in the curriculum is alsoimproved by the cultural relevance of the data employed in Datastorm events [3]. The Datastormevents also allow for students to engage in both collaborative and controlled competitiveenvironments which allow them to hone the soft skills they’ll need to navigate the workenvironment. The Datastorm system also provides a much needed supplementary educationalevaluation tool for instructors of Computing based majors [4].MethodsDatastorm involves pitting small teams of students in public competitions against each other tosolve custom designed programming challenges in real time. These challenges involve the use oflarge data sets obtained from selected local
research skills but also soft skills likecommunication, teamwork, and time management. The combination of practical research andtheoretical learning prepares students for future academic and professional pursuits.3. Educational SeminarsEach seminar is carefully structured to cover key aspects of research that are vital for anyaspiring researcher. These sessions delve into a range of topics, each chosen for its relevance andimportance in the field of research. The seminars begin with an introduction to the ResponsibleConduct of Research Training, a crucial topic that lays the foundation for ethical researchpractices. This training encompasses various aspects of research ethics, including datamanagement, conflict of interest, collaborative research
number of US students studyingabroad is back up to 188,753 in the 2021/22 academic year.1. The requirement of a global experiencein undergraduate engineering programs at the Whitacre College of Engineering (WCOE) started inFall 20132. Discussions with alumni, WCOE Deans Council members, and employers led the collegeto initiate a global experience as an attempt to empower graduates with soft skills related to workingin multi-cultural teams, respecting differences, and practicing engineering in a global context. Aminimum of 6 weeks global experience requirement included options of study abroad, internships,research, and service abroad. As with every requirement, there were cases where exemptions werejustified in cases of financial hardship, health