Attributes of a global engineer: Field-informed perspectives, recommendations, and implications

Abstract

What knowledge, skills, abilities, and characteristics are needed by engineering professionals living and working in an increasingly global context? At what stage of an engineer's professional development are these attributes acquired and applied? In what ways do academicians, employers, policymakers, and others play a role in equipping engineering students and practitioners with such attributes? And to what extent are there similarities and differences in the nature of expected attributes based on one's background or location? For the past three years, the ASEE Corporate Member Council's Special Interest Group for International Engineering Education developed, presented, and vetted with its stakeholders a series of attributes representing the desired competencies and characteristics needed by engineers in order to effectively live and work in a global context. An online survey was launched to validate the performance and proficiency levels of each attribute, including the stages at which attributes were essential to the preparation, performance, and employability of global engineers. Educators, employers, students, and professional engineers throughout the global engineering community were invited to participate in the survey. To promote input and obtain feedback from the largest possible global engineering audience, ASEE collaborated with the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES) to make the survey available in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. This paper describes the stakeholder-driven process to identify and define attributes of a global engineer; survey development and sampling procedures; summary of key findings-to-date; preliminary interpretations; and brief discussion and next steps. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.