Identifying Specific, Measurable “Skills” Perceived As Requisite For Graduating Aerospace Engineers

In the last 15 years engineering educators and industry practitioners have attempted to identify what skills a graduating engineer needs to acquire during his/her undergraduate education in order to be successful at design activities. The efforts to identify these design skills are hampered by both the lack of precision in the terms used to describe design skills and by the broad and vague nature of the requests to improve these skills as part of an undergraduate curriculum. A research study conducted over five years by the first author compared the specific skills requirements provided by industry practitioners to the published perceptions of engineering educators regarding the desires of industry practitioners. 1 The resulting lists of skills from the two cohort groups (industry practitioners and engineering educators) were then compared to the observed behaviors of nine different semesters of a senior engineering design course.