Design, Implementation, and Outcomes of a Comprehensive Professional Development Program for Post-Graduate Studies in Engineering

This paper describes a 5-year project in which we defined a gap in development of professional skills in postgraduate engineering education, identified effective methods for developing students’ professional skills, implemented a series of two required courses to develop them, and evaluated the effectiveness of the program. The courses content, assessments, teaching methodologies, and outcomes are discussed in this paper. Our 5 years of program evaluation are summarized. We describe how our program has been extended to multiple departments in the faculty of engineering and evolved from the model of individual to joint classes and teamteaching. Finally, we discuss effectiveness of those modes of teaching.