Teaching Transversal Skills in the Engineering Curriculum: the Need to Raise the Temperature

Engineers and architects today are dealing with great social, technical and environmental complexities, and the demand for having broadly educated holistic engineers will only continue to grow in the future. Being able to manage and lead diverse teams, understand complex, interdisciplinary systems and solve open-ended problems across and beyond different subjects is expected from the next generation of graduates. With the aim to understand how the future graduates are educated to cope with such complexities, we developed a tool to map out the course curricula and examined the extent to which transversal skills are taught at a leading technical university in Europe. Using MATLAB, we have conducted an exploratory analysis, and this concept paper offers the outcomes of analysing course descriptions of bachelor and master programmes throughout the academic year 2018-2019. By presenting the results in a visual form of a heatmap, we have examined at which moment throughout the curriculum and how frequently are transversal skills included in the teaching objectives. The results indicate an overall gap between teaching transversal skills at both BA and MA level, but also a difference in teaching transversal skill in mandatory and optional courses. Furthermore, throughout the curriculum we observed a significant lack of some critical skills, such as those connected to ethical reasoning. This project opened valuable avenue to deepen the discussion regarding teaching and learning of transversal skills, as well as the structural changes that need to be considered in the education of the engineers and architects in future.