In engineering education, our goal is to prepare students for professional workforces and there is significant interest in incorporating “employability skills” into engineering education (Shafiullah et al, Proceedings of the AAEE 2024). There are a variety of transferable skills that are required for successful student outcomes, such as written, verbal, and visual communication, computational skills, appropriate use of statistics, teamwork, and design-focused thinking. As we do not teach these skills in standalone courses, we must instead incorporate these skills within the curriculum. It has been suggested that these types of transferrable skills can be taught through various methods, but that the order/ organization of skills within the curriculum must be intentional to support student outcomes (Chadha et al, Int. J. Engng Ed. 2006).
Accordingly, this project focuses on, 1) developing efficient methods to teach these skills and 2) creating a multi-year curriculum to support skill acquisition. Here, we focus on building an “introduce-grow-reinforce” framework wherein skills are introduced to students in one course, grown in a new context via training exercises in a second course, and then reinforced in future courses. The framework uses consistent language, expectations, and rubrics from class to class. Deliverables in the “growth” phase are designed to connect both back to the introduce phase and forward to the reinforce phase.