Learning Professional Skills
Feedback helps students perform credibly in their discipline and in industry.
By Debra M. Gilbuena and Milo D. Koretsky
Stakeholders of undergraduate engineering programs widely view professional skills, such as teamwork and communication, as a critical aspect of an engineer’s job. With this recognition, ABET has incorporated professional skills as 6 of the 11 student outcomes in the engineering criteria, and many educators are seeking innovative ways to incorporate professional skills into the curriculum.
However, studies of professional skills are limited mostly to general decontextualized reflections from practitioners and educators about this aspect of their work. Such an approach has provided a comprehensive list of what might be considered professional skills, but there is limited understanding of the role of these skills in engineering project work, how they are embodied, or the type of feedback that best helps students develop these skills.
Our study sought to contribute to this understanding by gathering rich observational data as students engaged in an authentic, industrially situated engineering project. We described and analyzed verbal discourse between a coach and four senior-level student teams as the coach provided feedback, and among students as they worked in teams reflecting and acting on that feedback. To analyze the data, we used the construct of communities of practice. We considered three overlapping communities in which the participants engage: the discipline-based community of chemical engineering; the semiconductor industry community, specific to the industry in which the project is situated; and the student community.
In this study, approximately half the discussion between the coach and the student teams addressed professional skills, which included communication, documentation, teamwork, the economic impact of engineering solutions, and project management. Feedback on these skills was given by the coach and was generally in the context of technical aspects of the project. We found an interplay between the teams’ participation in professional skills activities and their participation in more technical activities.
Professional skills played a central role in the students’ enculturation process, both to the disciplinary community of chemical engineering and to the semiconductor industry community. Feedback helped students recognize how to use professional skills to represent themselves as legitimate members of both communities. The ways professional skills are embodied as participation in chemical engineering and participation in the semiconductor industry, while similar, have certain essential differences. For example, when one of the students, Carl, provided a response that the silicon wafers were “20 centimeters” in diameter, the coach corrected Carl with “200 millimeters.” The project is situated in the semiconductor industry, where engineers refer to wafer sizes in units of millimeters (or inches) but never in centimeters. While Carl would be considered correct from a disciplinary standpoint, his answer reveals a lack of credibility and legitimacy in the industrial community.
Educators should explicitly attend to both communities. If educators focus solely on disciplinary community activities and do not acknowledge industry-specific aspects, some students who have had internships or other experiences interacting with practicing engineers may focus on the differences between academics and the “real world” and not connect what they learn in class to applications in industry. They may come to believe that they will learn everything they need to know in industry and place diminished value on their education. Furthermore, feedback should
cover students’ use of professional skills to reinforce their legitimacy in these communities.
The ways engineering educators integrate professional skills into their courses and the feedback they provide students help to determine students’ attitudes about these skills, how they participate in the activities involving these skills, and how central they consider these skills to be in engineering. When considering how to incorporate professional skills into engineering projects and courses, educators should recognize the critical interaction between developing professional and technical skills. Wherever possible, they should employ an integrative approach where students can connect their use of professional skills directly to their technical work, the engineering objectives they pursue, and their future careers.
Debra M. Gilbuena performed this research as a Ph.D. candidate and a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University, where Milo D. Koretsky is a professor. This article is based on “Feedback on Professional Skills as Enculturation into Communities of Practice” in the January 2015 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education. The work was supported with NSF grant EEC1160353 and conducted in collaboration with co-authors Benjamin Sherrett, Edith Gummer, and Audrey Champagne.