This is my first blog in more than a year, I just discovered. But no worries, soon you will see more appearing. The reason it has been so quiet is that I did a thing, or actually, WE did a thing. Those of you who know me well, know that I am an active SEFI member and that my research interests amongst others is competencies and skills in engineering education. I am not the only one, and many of us are part of the SEFI Special Interest Group on Engineering Skills, which meets monthly online. In one such meeting, great minds started thinking alike, as they do, and born was the idea to write a book on skills. Not just any book, but the SEFI Handbook on Engineering Skills – Volume A: Teaching Core Transferable Competencies & Skills in Engineering. So hence this Blog, to keep everyone informed on the progress of putting this handbook together.
Why this handbook?
The honest reason is, that no such handbook exists and we all wish we had one when we first started. Transferable competencies and skills (or 21st-century skills, transferable skills, professional skills, non-technical skills or the inappropriate term of soft skills - we will address this cacophony of terms also) are an intrinsic part of Engineering Education, though not directly related to a specific engineering discipline. Whilst a lot of research has been done in this area, this research area is very wide, context-specific and hard to navigate for engineering practitioners, who want to learn more or improve their current teaching of transferable skills. In addition, not all practitioners have access to this research. So that is why, we, the SEFI Special Interest Group on Engineering Skills intend to create an evidence-based handbook on teaching core transferable competencies & skills in engineering programmes aimed at engineering education practitioners, curriculum developers, and budding engineering education researchers interested in transferable competencies and skills. The handbook will published (at SEFI 2026) as an Open Science book meaning it will be available for free to everyone, published under a CC-BY license.
Who is We?
From our SEFI SIG on Engineering skills, a group of people came together and formed an editorial team.
My fellow editors-in-chief are Lynn van den Broeck of KU Leuven in Belgium (Left) and Esther Perea Borobio (Right), formerly of Imperial College London in the United Kingdom and together with our part editors who will be in charge of each of the 5 parts of the handbook, we form the editorial team:
Part 1 - Competencies: Context & Challenges: Esther Perea Borobio, (UK), Lynn van den Broeck, KU Leuven (BE), Gillian Saunders-Smits, TU Delft (NL)
Part 2 - Embedding competencies and skills in your classes: Kurt Coppens, KU Leuven (BE), Helena Kovacs, EPFL (CH), Abel Nyamphene, UCL (UK), Esther Perea Borobio, (UK)
Part 3 - Assessing competencies and skills: Jenny Griffiths, UCL (UK), Thies Johannsen, TU Berlin (D), Lynn van den Broeck, KU Leuven (BE).
Part 4 - Embedding transferable competencies and skills at the
curriculum level - the Current State-of-the-Art: Neil Cooke, University of Birmingham (UK), Emanuela Tilley, UCL (UK), Gillian Saunders-Smits, TU Delft (NL)
Part 5 - Evaluating needs, interventions, and outcomes of skills and
competencies: Natascha van Hattum-Janssen, Saxion University of Applied Sciences (NL), Esther Ventura-Medina, Eindhoven University of Technology (NL), Gillian Saunders-Smits, TU Delft (NL)
Most of us met face-to-face at the SEFI conference (where we omitted to take a picture) and online and are now preparing the templates for each part in submeetings. We are also in the process of finalising our talks with our intended publisher and inviting authors for our invited chapters in part 1.
Can I contribute?
Absolutely, if you would like to contribute to the handbook, please check out our call for authors and the more detailed call listing all chapters, the scope, and all competencies and skills we have included. The deadline for expression of interest is 1 December 2024.
Don't worry if you have no previous experience in writing a handbook. We aim to create diverse teams of people to write together for many of the chapters, so there is room for all levels of experience, making this also a great opportunity to collaborate with new people!
Next time...
I intend to write monthly updates on our progress, so in November, I hope to be able to tell you more about our publisher and report on the rest of our progress to date.
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