Socio-Emotional Competencies in Engineering Education* M a LUISA CASADO 1 , DANIEL LO ´ PEZ 2 and VICTORIA LAPUERTA 3 1 Department of Surveying Engineering and Mapping, Technical University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain. E-mail: ml.casado@upm.es 2 Department of Training and Research, MeM Group, Madrid, Spain. E-mail: daniel.lopez@memgroup.es 3 E.T.S.I. Aerona ´utica y del Espacio, Technical University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain. E-mail: mariavictoria.lapuerta@upm.es This paper gathers the research done from 2009 to 2014 in the context of a project consisting of several educational innovation projects carried out at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) whose aim was to improve the socio- emotional competencies of its students and professors, in line with some requirements of the European Higher Education Area such as ‘‘preparing students for life as active citizens in a democratic society; preparing students for their future careers and enabling their personal development’’. The promotion of these competencies in the engineering students can help them to optimize their academic achievement and to increase their competitiveness in the business world. Meanwhile, the socio-emotional development of the teachers can help them to create an atmosphere that supports student learning. The training techniques (online, blended and face-to-face seminars, and Coaching processes) and the outcome research methods (ad-hoc surveys and tests, pre-post evaluation using Emotional Intelligence evaluation tests) used in the five-year project are presented in this manuscript, as well as the results obtained from the 451 students and 135 professors from six engineering schools of the UPM who enrolled in the project. The benefits of these projects (a significant increase in the students’ emotional quotient and in the professors’ emotional skills have been achieved) and the sustainability of their activities (an emotional competencies development online classroom, accessible to the entire university community, has been launched) are highly encouraging. Keywords: transversal competencies; emotional competencies; emotional intelligence; coaching 1. Introduction The recent paradigm of teaching-learning proposed by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) [1] that has placed the student at the center of education has meant a shift from a teaching-cen- tered education to a learning-centered education. It implies that it is the student who should set objec- tives, manage knowledge, update it, continuously learn and be able to adapt him/herself to new and changing situations [2]. In this context, it is relevant to focus on the competencies to be acquired by the student. In the framework of the Tuning project [3], agreements related to the issue of competencies in European higher education were examined. The competencies were categorized for each degree and subject, and as transversal or generic competencies, which were subcategorized as instrumental, inter- personal and systemic. These last competencies identify the shared points that can be common to any European degree, and as many of them are related to socio-emotional abilities, they could be practiced using the Emotional Intelligence (EI) [4, 5] and Coaching [6] disciplines. Furthermore, one of the main objectives of the EHEA is that students also reach the necessary level in personal skills in the business world. In the context of a changing and competitive society, where the demand for future graduates is in con- stant reformulation, it is critical to prepare students in their socio-emotional dimension. In this sense, the socio-emotional competencies are increasingly in demand and appreciated in the professional environment. Nowadays, the EI and Coaching disciplines are highly used in many companies that are investing significant resources in training their employees in socio-emotional competencies [7–9]. This is because one of the keys to the success of a company is that the employees properly regulate their emotions and mood states, as well as recognize the concerns and needs of their leaders, coworkers, customers, etc. In the scenario described, it is easy to understand that educators in the engineering field consider the socio-emotional skills as a set of skills that needs to be included in the future engineering curriculum [10–14]. It seems clear that the development of socio-emotional competencies in engineering stu- dents affects their performance, may lead to lower dropout rates and affects the professional success of the engineering graduates [10–16]. However, although socio-emotional competencies are encour- aged in very early education stages, the same has not happened in general in higher education. Its training at this educational level requires a more advanced training of teachers and the use of innovative training strategies to improve the socio-emotional competencies of engineering students [17]. Along these lines, recent researches have performed differ- ent training techniques with engineering students to improve their EI skills [14, 15, 18–22]. In this paper, the steps taken by the Technical University of * Accepted 20 March 2016. 1660 International Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 1660–1678, 2016 0949-149X/91 $3.00+0.00 Printed in Great Britain # 2016 TEMPUS Publications.