Defining, developing and assessing global competence in engineers

Engineering curricula are increasingly focused on developing student competencies. Many new competencies needed by engineers today are professional skills (sometimes called the ‘soft skills’). Among the new competencies for engineering graduates is global competence, the ability to work knowledgeably and live comfortably in a transnational engineering environment and global society. While there is broad agreement within the engineering community for the need to better prepare engineers for global practice, there is much less agreement as to what skills and abilities define global competence, what combination and duration of international education and experiences best instil it and what means and metrics should be used to judge whether students have attained it. This paper presents a conceptual model to define global competence, a curriculum model for instilling it and an assessment model to determine if graduates have attained it. It concludes with a description of a quasi-experimental research effort now underway designed to evaluate and validate these models.