Integrating Sustainable Competences and Green Skills in the Hungarian Environmental Engineering Education

Abstract

Engineering plays a crucial part in responding to the biggest challenges of our era, including the transition toward a green economy by meeting the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 and by achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Engineering education could be the leading actor in preparing engineers for these complex tasks and spread the necessary green knowledge, interdisciplinary skills, and competences to pursue a sustainable future. Hungary's education system has improved significantly in the last decade, considering the Central Eastern European region. A new national higher education strategy in 2014 set new directions for its development in many aspects, including an emphasis on soft skill development in the curricula. The Hungarian higher education system was characterized for decades by memorizing facts and figures; therefore, the effective integration of soft skill development is a slow process. In our study, we first provide a systematic review of the international and national literature to identify fundamental sustainability skills and competences for engineering. We also examine the Hungarian higher education frameworks and the skill-related output requirements in the environmental engineering programs. In the second part of the research, we present a qualitative study of in-depth interviews with Hungarian experts with different academic profiles and a focus group study with environmental engineering students about their views on green skills. Our results show that the concept of green skills is slowly spreading in environmental engineering university communities in Hungary; however, the effective implementation into the curricula will require some more time and work.