Raising awareness for professional roles in the Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes in Engineering Technology

There are many reasons why we want engineering students to be well-informed about their possible future careers. It can increase their motivation and study persistence, and help them in making informed decisions and in being well-prepared for their first professional experiences [1,2]. Furthermore, there is an increasing call in engineering education research and policy networks for more emphasis on the diversity of engineering careers and more specifically on the transversal skills that are required by the labour market, like teamwork, communication or problem-solving skills [3,4]. Yet, there is a lot of room for improving students’ awareness. For example, Karataş et al. [5] showed that a substantial number of first-year engineering students did not consider social skills such as teamwork and communication skills as important for a good engineer. At the Faculty of Engineering Technology of KU Leuven, the ‘Rolling’ project was therefore initiated in 2014 with the aim to bridge this awareness gap and to provide students with realistic prospects of the engineering profession. In this paper we describe how we aim to achieve this and discuss our lessons learned so far.

ISBN:9782873520144

Jaar van publicatie:2016

Toegankelijkheid:Closed