Integrating Soft Skills into Engineering Education for Increased Student Throughput and more Professional Engineers

Abstract

Soft skills are recognized as crucial for engineers
as technical work is becoming more and more collaborative
and interdisciplinary. Today many engineering educations fail
to give appropriate training in soft skills. Linköping University
has therefore developed a completely new course
“Professionalism for Engineers” for two of its 5-year
engineering programs in the area of computer science. The
course stretches over the first 3 years with students from all
three years taking it together. The purpose of the course is to
give engineering students training in soft skills that are of
importance during the engineering education as well as during
their professional career. The examination is based on the
Dialogue Seminar Method developed for learning from
experience and through reflection. The organization of the
course is innovative in many ways such as we use dialogue
seminar method for reflective practice, have mixed groups with
students from year 1, 2, and 3 where each group has a teacher
mentor. The indications so far show that fewer students drop
out from the program.
In this paper we share our experience from introducing the
course and the results so far.