The ABET “Professional Skills” - Can They Be Taught? Can They Be Assessed?

In developing its new engineering accreditation criteria, ABET reaffirmed a set of “hard” engineering skills while introducing a second, equally important, set of six “professional” skills. These latter skills include communication, teamwork, and understanding ethics and professionalism, which we label process skills, and engineering within a global and societal context, lifelong learning, and a knowledge of contemporary issues, which we designate as awareness skills. We review these skills with an emphasis on how they can be taught, or more correctly learned, citing a number of examples of successful and/or promising implementations. We then examine the difficult issue of assessing these skills. We are very…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• UO
  University of Pittsburgh
• DO
  Division of Engineering Education and Centers