How well does UK higher education prepare engineers for their careers? Our report for Engineers 2030

‘Calibrating Future Curricula’ investigates how well various components of engineering education prepare graduates from a wide range of disciplines for their careers as professional engineers, including reckoning with societal challenges and new technologies. The information provided gives insight not just into the skills needed, but the forms of teaching and learning that best nurture them.

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The Centre’s report has been published as part of the Engineers 2030 project, led by the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC) and the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng). Engineers 2030 aims to identify the changing attributes engineers need in the 21st century, how to impart these to them, and attract a new generation of engineers that can collaborate responsibly and creatively to resolve pressing challenges. This is the Centre’s second report for Engineers 2030, following last year’s publication of ‘Review of the teaching of sustainability in UK engineering higher education’.

The exercise involved a desk-based review of 16 Russell Group, Pre-92 and Post-92 universities’ teaching of key skills, and a series of interviews and focus groups with 40 recent graduates from a range of engineering disciplines and higher education institutions. While four key disciplines – chemical, civil, mechanical and electronic and electrical engineering – were central to the report, reflections from graduates from several other engineering backgrounds also feature.

The report identifies skills common to multiple engineering disciplines, including but not limited to site work, ethics, teamwork, interdisciplinarity, lifelong and active learning, law and sustainability. It locates where they are taught in different institutions and disciplines and, in collaboration with interviewees, when, how and to what extent they are imparted to students. Interviewees contextualise their reflections with specific examples from their working lives. Based on its findings, ‘Calibrating Future Curricula’ suggests diverse, concrete methods to impart these key skills.

The authors of the report reflect on developments in engineering education that have supported the cultivation of these skills, and how industry, accreditors and educators can collaborate to further improve how we equip the engineers of the future.

The research team behind this report was composed of the following academics at the Centre: Professor David Guile, Professor John Mitchell, Dr Diana Adela Martin and Dr Stephen Hunt.

Read more about Engineers 2030

Calibrating Future Curricula report