Soft Skills in Engineering Education A practical experience in an undergraduate course Uriel Rubén Cukierman, Juan María Palmieri Information Systems Engineering Department Facultad Regional Bs. As., Univ. Tecnológica Nacional Buenos Aires, Argentina uriel@utn.edu.ar, jpalmieri@rec.utn.edu.ar Abstract— Current society demands not only more engineers, but better ones, equipped with abilities to solve complex technical challenges, working in interdisciplinary teams and dealing with social and cultural issues as well. These non-technical requirements, usually designated as “soft skills”, are being required by accreditation boards, engineering schools’ authorities and the industry itself, lengthwise and crosswise the whole world. This paper describes the methodology developed by its authors in order to integrate the teaching and practice of "Soft Skills" in an undergraduate engineering course without sacrificing, by doing so, the specific subjects that the syllabus requires. Keywords— soft skills, learning management systems, collaborative learning I. INTRODUCTION Engineering Education has evolved from its earliest formal experiences during the 18th century in France, where much of their learning was based on actual engineering projects [1], passing through the post-world wars period, when engineering was taught by a balance of older industry-experienced faculty and the new, younger research faculty [2] and finally arriving to the current situation in which the society demands not only more engineers, but better ones, equipped with abilities to solve complex technical challenges, working in interdisciplinary teams and dealing with social and cultural issues as well. These non-technical requirements, usually designated as “soft skills”, are being demanded by accreditation boards, engineering schools’ authorities and the industry itself, lengthwise and crosswise the whole world. The authors of this paper found ourselves with a strong feeling that we need to somehow integrate those soft skills into the curriculum of our “Communication and Networks” course without sacrificing, by doing so, the specific subjects that the syllabus requires. Our felling became sureness when we realized that a very significant percentage of our students, even good ones, were unable to demonstrate their knowledge, discuss with pairs and teachers and work in groups. We then designed a methodology, strongly supported by learning technologies, which allowed us to make our first experience during the 2013 academic period. The results were far more than encouraging and have improved the method based on the feedback received from the students and from our own learnings in order to make the second experience, that is taking place during this year. II. BACKGROUND In February 2014, the prestigious and well known journalist and writer Thomas Friedman published an article in the New York Times entitled “How to Get a Job at Google” [3]. In this article, the author refers to an interview in which the senior vice president of people operations for Google noted that they had determined that G.P.A.’s (Grade Point Average) are worthless as a criteria for hiring. The article goes through the five hiring attributes that Google has across the company and finishes with an important conclusion: “Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about – and pays off on – what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills – leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.” But this is not just a “rare” condition or criteria established by Google’s recruiters, similar conclusions can be obtained by asking engineering graduates. An interesting study developed by Staffan Nilsson (Former President of the European Economic and Social Committee) among recent graduates from Master's level engineering programs in Information Technology indicate that “engineering graduates have educational expectations that are not entirely consistent with current university practices. The study respondents indicated that the educational program should focus less on the substantive content of the engineering curriculum, and instead focus more on generalist competence and soft employability skills, including interpersonal skills” [4]. Almost twenty years ago, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched a process of rethinking the fundamental principles that guide the approaches to education and learning in the current context of globalization. One outcome of that initiative was the document entitled “Learning: The Treasure Within” [5], commonly referred to as the “Delors Report”, which proposes a holistic and integrated vision of education based on the paradigms of lifelong learning, and the four pillars of learning to be, to know, to do, and to live together. The third pillar is particularly applicable for our analysis: “Learning to do, in order to acquire Page 237 Proceedings of 2014 International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL) 978-1-4799-4438-5/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE 03-06 December 2014, Dubai, UAE