Integrating professional skills in engineering education: Project management as case

Employers increasingly expect professional skills with their new engineers. Integrating the learning of professional skills is a key feature of CDIO-based education. Examples of relevant professional skills are critical thinking, teamwork, communication, sustainability, and an array of management skills. Worldwide, universities face the challenge of integrating these professional skills into their engineering education curricula. Among the often-cited professional skills for the 21st century is project management (PM). Because universities must balance the quality of learning with budget limits, they often face the dilemma of choosing between (a) offering generic PM-classes for all students or (b) integrating PM theory and methods into discipline-specific projects (Design-Implement Experiences in the CDIOterminology). While generic PM-classes are taught by PM-experts, they lack the specifics of individual engineering disciplines. There are vast differences between building a tunnel, optimizing power plant utilization, and redesigning an app’s user interface. Projects from different engineering disciplines differ in actor heterogeneity, activity sequencing, project team organization, and ‘degree of outdoorsiness’. Discipline-specific projects, on the other hand, are integrated parts of individual engineering programs. While these projects are supervised by discipline-experts, they may lack in adequate generic PM expertise. This study presents and examines the design and delivery of a large PM-class that is taught by a PM-expert and integrates the individual engineering disciplines directly into the curriculum. This course reaps the benefits of both options (a) and (b) mentioned above. Among the key learnings, that the paper presents is that success delivery of the class requires in-depth collaboration between the PM-experts, who function as the primary instructors, and experts on each individual engineering discipline. The paper details a step-by-step process for the development and delivery of the class as well as results from running the class in the spring of 2021.