Engineering the future: transversal skills in
Engineering Doctoral Education
Helena Martins
University Lusófona. Faculty of Engineering. University of
Lisbon, Portugal
Porto, Portugal
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8974-5874
2021 4th International Conference of the Portuguese Society for Engineering Education (CISPEE) | 978-1-7281-6492-2/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/CISPEE47794.2021.9507210
CEOS.PP, ISCAP.P.Porto
Porto, Portugal
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0749-917X
Ana Salgado
ESS-PPorto
ESE-Paula Frassinetti
Porto, Portugal
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8237-9522
Abstract— Over the last decade there has been a significant
increase in doctoral students and researchers in Engineering.
Entry-level skills for these academic positions are often mostly
technical and frequently associated with profiles that thrive in
analytical and frequently solitary tasks in laboratorial
environments. However, success in doctoral programs and
research careers is highly dependent on competencies that are
both intrapersonal (e.g. time management, self-regulation,
emotional intelligence, resilience) and interpersonal (e.g.
teamworking, communication, negotiation, etc). Since the
recruitment of doctoral graduates has changed significantly due
to the decrease in open positions in research and professorship
at universities, the transition from academia to industry has
been gaining more attention from the Engineering Education
community. Despite this, many studies point out that the
competencies developed in Portuguese doctoral programs do not
motivate nor prepare PhD graduates for a career outside
academia and also don’t match industry requirements in terms
of competencies needed to thrive in such environments. In
response, assessment reports and policy papers have been
highlighting the need to rethink doctoral programs curricula in
order to prepare engineering graduates for their future careers
both in academia and industry. The basis for this has been
advocated in the development of a specific skill set of transversal
competencies. With this study, we intended to identify the
transversal skills clusters that result from engineering doctoral
education literature, make engineering researchers and
managers aware of the importance of transversal skills, identify
potential gaps in the literature and avenues for future research.
In order to have a broad overview of the transversal
competencies of PhD candidates in engineering, a preliminary
bibliometric analysis of 2756 papers published in the last two
decades was conducted using VOSviewer. The results show
evidence of literature clusters related to 1) necessary skills for
successfully concluding the PhD program; 2) the shift from the
academic world to the labor market; 3) interpersonal
competencies. In the discussion of the results, the authors: 1)
advocate the emergency for HEIs to develop institutional
strategies that contemplate formal opportunities to develop
transversal skills during the doctoral path and ensure
employability prospects for PhD candidates; b) propose the use
of a framework of competencies for PhD candidates in
engineering that may orientate the implementation of such
institutional strategies and also help candidates to transfer such
skills to industry/business in the transition from academia to
industry.
978-1-7281-6492-2/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
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Ana Freitas Inês Direito
Centre for Engineering Education.
Porto University College
London, UK
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8471-9105
Keywords—doctoral education, engineering, soft skills,
transversal competencies, transition to industry, VOSviewer.
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the last decades, the number of Higher Education
students enrolled in engineering doctoral programs, as well
as the number of academic researchers in engineering, has
expanded. This poses major challenges to Higher Education
Institutions (HEIs), which have the societal responsibility to
promote the employability prospects of PhD candidates, by
preparing them to become well succeed in their careers, and,
at the same time, to address the skills requirements and
expectations of industries and companies.
Engineers in the post-industrial world, despite being
generally perceived as individual technical contributors, are
required to possess much more than technical expertise in
their fields. Moreover, employers expect them to have a wide
range of non-technical skills, like communicating effectively,
work in teams, [1], and to be adaptable to the 21st century
challenges - the constant, unpredictable changes that are now
the norm in many industries.
To tackle these challenges, engineering programs
worldwide have begun to promote the development of soft
skills at graduate level. Nonetheless, the integration of these
skills remains highly demanding: engineering programs are
still too focused on technical skills, while paying insufficient
attention to nontechnical skills [2,3]; engineering educators
often find difficulties in balancing different curriculum
demands [4].
The entry route to become a researcher is frequently
through the completion of a doctorate degree and the
development of a high level set of skills [5]. Whereas some
educational systems offer doctorate programs with a taught
component, in many other cases the completion of a doctorate
degree is almost exclusively research based [5]. The skills
included in the taught component are usually highly technical
and discipline specific. Moreover, being a researcher in a
field as technical as engineering, requires specific skills,
attitudes and a mindset most commonly associated with
attention to detail, critical thinking, analysis and persistence
and less related with social and soft skills like
communication, teamwork, and empathy.
Soft skills are core to doctoral students and researchers'
ability to do their work, even more when facing difficulties
and setbacks, as well as when interacting with colleagues and
supervisors. However, these skills are not sufficiently nor
usually addressed in engineering doctoral programs -
research on the transition to the workplace showed that
doctoral studies do not prepare graduates for non-academic
jobs well enough [6,7].
This means that highly skilled people in the field of
engineering are facing important issues that give rise to the
need to develop skills to overcome difficulties in pursuing
their goals and finishing their tasks, as well as competencies
in order to successfully transition from the academia to
company mindset.
Several studies [eg. 8,9,10,11,12,13, 14 cit.1] highlight the
need of redesigning engineering doctoral education in order
to close the gap academia-industry expectations about what
skills should engineers have at an entry-level [15].
We hope the discussion and models reflected in this paper
contribute to paving the way for a more well-rounded
education of doctorate engineering students and researchers.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
A. How are Soft Skills defined?
According to Dell’Aquila et al. [16], there is no such thing
as a universal definition of “soft skills”. These are a wide-
ranging concept that covers many dimensions and combines
behavioural, cognitive and emotional components. Due to
this complexity, it is hard to determine what is, and what is
not, included under this definition. [17].
The literature often defines soft skills as skills that help us
adapt to a certain environment [18 cit. 17], and a set of
components like attitude, abilities, habits and practices [19
cit. 17]. Other definitions state that soft skills are
interpersonal skills that make our communication and
relation to other more effective [20 cit. 17].
A different approach to the definition of soft skills focuses
on contrasting these skills with “hard skills”, which relate to
technical knowledge, hands-on practice skills that are
specific to perform a role or job and are context dependent.
[21, 22, 23].
B. Why are Soft Skills important for engineers?
The general opinion among engineering education
scholars is that technical skills might not be enough to
succeed in the professional world [for example: 22 12]. These
scholars advocate that those soft skills are as important to
engineering formation and practice as technical skills [24];
soft skills supplement and enhance hard skills and its practice
[19]; and are crucial for a successful adaptation and
performance in the workplace [21,25]. The rapid changes in
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technology also highlight the importance of soft skills –
whereas specific, context-related hard skills can become
obsolete in a relatively short period of time, the transversal
nature of soft skills remain relevant in different disciplines
and work scenarios, but also in personal and social contexts.
[26].
The importance of soft skills is highlighted by
technology-intensive projects – the lack of soft skills has been
found to be related to failure in projects [27,28]. For example,
250 technical leaders mentioned that insufficient soft skills
were the main reason for unsuccessful projects [28 cit 17].
In addition, many key employability skills – such as
teamwork, communication, decision-making – are, in fact,
soft skills [29]. Engineering students are not fully aware of
the set of soft skills that are needed in entry-level jobs [30].
However, engineering students tend to rate the importance of
softs skills higher compared to early career engineers [31].
The major gains in promoting the development of soft and
transferable competencies are in teamwork, and in following
areas: communication and negotiation, leadership styles, and
interpersonal relationships. Working in teams, or groups,
promotes collaboration and discussion of work-related ideas
among students [32].
However, these skills are hard to teach through
conventional lecturing styles and engineering modules [33].
In order to prepare students to a complex and highly volatile
workplace, higher education institutions and educators need
to support students’ development of soft skills [34].
C. How are engineering HEIs promoting the development
of Soft Skills?
Despite their significance and urgency, soft skills are
insufficiently addressed in higher education programs. They
may be described in the curricula explicitly, yet their delivery
and development have been overlooked for many decades.
Acknowledging the importance of transversal
competencies, and the idea that the ‘global engineer’ of the
21st century is not just a professional with sound technical
knowledge but, more than that, a professional who is a team
player with high technical expertise [35], many higher
education institutions have started incorporating these skills
in their programs. For example, large institutions in the
United States, such as Purdue University, have implemented
extensive changes into their curricular programs – two pillars
of the Purdue Engineering Education (Abilities, Knowledge
Areas and Qualities) consist mainly of softs skills (e.g.,
Abilities – communication; Qualities – adaptable in a
changing environment).
In order to promote transversal competencies in their
students, Colorado State University (CSU) created a specific
office called ‘Professional Learning Institute’ prioritizing
‘leadership’ skills. Their strategy was to team up with
industry professionals in order to promote skills such as time
management, conflict resolution, etc.[3] Also, other
prominent HEIs such as Penn State, MIT and Stanford have
also created programs or minors to develop
‘intra/entrepreneurship’ competencies as well as other skills
such as communication and teamwork. The goal is to
empower students, making them feel more motivated and
confident to create businesses [36; 37].
There seems to be several strategies in promoting
transversal competencies for students, namely:
• Either infusing them in the courses of the
curriculum linking them to the scientific-
technical competencies [38];
• either creating them as singular courses in the
curriculum (optional/elective curricular units).
This case is referred in literature [39] as an
integrating approach to the development of
transversal competencies)
• either creating them ‘outside’ the engineering
programs, so that students can attend them
extracurricularly. This is is referred in literature
[40] as a bolting-on approach to the development
of transversal competencies.
Each of these strategies presents added value, particularly
when combined.
D. What is the importance of Transversal Competencies in
the transition to work and career planning?
Several studies have demonstrated that a lot of students
who graduate in engineering pursue a career in management.
The results seem to point out that engineering students know
what are demands of the market demands and that jobs are
highly competitive. Therefore, one in two students (45.3%)
intend to pursue a postgraduate degree, and almost two in
three students (60%) would prefer to study towards a
Business and Administration or other management-related
qualification [1]. Thus, they need to differentiate themselves,
they need their CVs to be appealing to recruiters, they need
to show evidence they will be an added value to the
companies. Transversal skills seem to fill that gap and
contribute to mitigate these strains.
Career planning in the worksite has been widely
disseminated as an essential skill, however HEIs should also
prioritize it and make it available for their students during
their academic paths.
Engineering HEIs should make transversal skills available
(either infusing or integrating them in the curricula or even
offering them extracurricularly) for their students and provide
them with experiences similar to what they will face in the
work set [1]. Not only it makes graduates CVs more
appealing to recruiters, but it also seems to give students more
confidence to transition into the labour market. It also helps
to mitigate economic losses and timely avoid career drifts.
III. METHODOLOGY
A. Method
This papers’ researchers approach was based on data-
mining terms from scientific journals. Thus, a systematized
approach to literature review was used in this work, where,
using the Web of Science database a set of papers was selected
considering the following criteria:
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• Searched for: TOPIC: (phd student) OR TOPIC: (phd
candidate) AND TOPIC: (competenc*) OR TOPIC: (soft
skills) AND TOPIC: (engineering)
• Refined by: WEB OF SCIENCE CATEGORIES: (
EDUCATION EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH OR
EDUCATION SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES )
• Timespan: All years. Indexes: SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI,
A&HCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, ESCI, CCR-EXPANDED,
IC.
The resulting set of 2756 papers was then analyzed using
the VOSviewer software [41]. The mapping technique used
by this software is called ‘visualization of similarities’ (VOS).
In this study, VOSviewer was used to create a text-based
map, using both the titles and abstracts from the papers, and
included only the 250 most occurring terms. In the final step
of the analysis we eliminated all the terms that were evidently
related with methodology or mere scientific writing (e.g.
factor analysis, originality value, cross sectional study) as
well as common words in the English language which were
devoid of meaning (e.g. for, and, to).
This software maps out the clustering of the terms under
analysis and provides a visual framework [42]. Here, the
layout (i.e., the location of the terms in the map) is determined
by the mapping technique, whereas clustering technique
groups the terms by color.
A preliminary analysis of bibliometry was extracted from
the Web of Science website regarding the citation report of
this search and is presented in the Results section.
IV. RESULTS
A) Citation report
This topic is clearly becoming more popular, as citations
are growing in a quasi-linear fashion since 2013 (Figure 1).
This indicates a definite increase in interest in the area of soft
skills/competencies for PhD students/candidates.
Fig. 1. Web of Science generated frequency graphic displays of the sum of
times the papers in our sample were cited per year.
The tree map of results provided by the Web of Science
further indicates that most of this research has been conducted
in the education field, followed by social sciences (Figure 2).
There seems to be a lack of literature in the engineering
field on transversal competencies/soft skills, even though our
search specifically requested that engineering be one of the
topics for the collected papers.
Fig. 2. Web of Science generated tree maps for the present research’s
Bolean equation.
B) VOSViewer term map analysis
Understanding the most frequently used terms as well as
how they co-occur in the literature allows us to get a good
general idea of the type of issues and relationships being
studied in the literature. Using the VOSviewer software we
aimed to explore how the present topic has been addressed in
the literature (Figure 3).
Fig. 3. VOSviewer results for the text-based mapping and clustering.
Three robust clusters appeared in our analysis.
• Cluster 1 (represented in red), with terms including PhD,
doctoral education, supervisor, identity, anxiety and
academic writing, among others seems to focus the skills
necessary for successfully concluding the PhD program;
• Cluster 2 (in green), with terms including engineering,
formation, labour market, and employability seems to
address the shift from the academic world to the labour
market;
• Cluster 3 (in blue), which includes most of the identified
interpersonal competencies terms such as
communication skill and teamwork, training program,
and indicates significant co-occurrence of these terms
with social work and medical education/resident.
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V. DISCUSSION
Our results seem to indicate a clear two-fold reality: the
study of soft skills/competencies in PhD students/candidates
in engineering is becoming a more and more relevant field,
with increasing citations every year on one hand. However,
the bibliometric analysis suggest that this topic is still scantily
represented in the Engineering Education literature, in
contrast to the Medical Education area, which has been
prolific in publishing studies on the development of soft
skills/transversal competencies for PhD students and
graduates on the other.
This reality can be explained if we look at how this last
decade has evolved in terms of employability prospects for
PhD graduates: there has been a substantial decrease of
vacancies for research and professorship jobs in academia, yet
there seems to be a rising interest from industries in recruiting
engineering PhD graduates [43, 44]. This means that these
graduates will need to transition out of academia once they
graduate, which means they need more than ever the skills to
help them increase their employability and facilitate such
switch, including soft skills/transversal competencies.
Conversely, industry expects such graduates to go beyond the
scientific and technical knowledge, by steering the integration
of innovative solutions, have project management skills,
interpersonal competencies, collaboration, leadership and
performance management, innovation and some knowledge
about business [45, 46, 47]. A specific skill set in the soft
skills/transversal competencies area is thus indispensable,
which is encouraging the growing interest in this type of
competencies.
The analysis with VOSviewer found clusters suggesting
that Engineering Education literature seems to be mostly
focused on the skills necessary for successful PhD
completion, productivity and anxiety management and
supervisor relationship (cluster 1). Most significantly in
engineering these skills have been equated to how to transition
to the labor market, such as readiness and employability
(cluster 2). This seems to be consistent with literature that
reveals that 3rd cycle studies do not sufficiently prepare PhD
graduates for opportunities other than in academia [6,7].
Engineering 3rd cycle programs still develop very technical
profiles, much focused on developing research skills [48] and
the PhD graduates’ skill set seems to be insufficient to fulfill
industry requirements and expectations. In fact, reports about
the evaluation of doctoral programs and also several policy
papers [49,50,51,52] have identified the need to further
discuss the curricula of 3rd cycle programs to make PhD
candidates competitive and successful in employment
opportunities other than those inside academia.
Interestingly enough, interpersonal competencies such as
communication skills and teamwork are strongly linked to
Medical Education and Social work, but not so much to
Engineering Education (cluster 3). These findings are
interesting in the sense that although there seems to be an
increase in the interest in soft skills/competencies in PhD
students or candidates, these seem to have a rather
instrumental aspect, focused on the completion of the PhD
program and in the transition to industry than to prepare PhD
graduates to be competitive and competent in their jobs
outside academia.
Regarding the poor attention that literature of the
engineering field has been having towards the transversal
competencies/soft skills for PhDs, this may be explained by
the fact that Engineering Education as a field of research is not
yet maturely establish as, for instance, is Medical Education.
This may be due to the fact that Engineering Education
Research is a relatively new academic field [53], which adopts
a variety of interdisciplinary approaches.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
As previously established in the Introduction, the
landscape for PhD graduates is changing where the ability to
lead, work with others, communicate assertively and to
manage one’s emotions are becoming crucial elements to be
competitive in the employment context and also to be
competent in the role expected for a PhD graduate. In
companies/industry in the postindustrial world, despite still
being generally perceived as individual technical contributors,
being an engineer requires much more than having a sound
technical knowledge, skills and expertise – employers’ expect
engineers to be equipped with a wide range of soft skills
including management, working in teams and effective
communication skills and working in teams [1]. This is even
more relevant in addressing the 21st century challenges, and
the constant, unpredictable changes that are now the norm in
many industries.
The current perspective of the Engineering Education
literature is that the development of soft skills/transversal
competencies for PhD candidates is relevant only in the sense
of completion of the program and integrating them in the job
market. Little attention is given to transversal competencies
that relate to self-development, mental health as well as others.
Such skills will help PhD graduates not only on the
completion of their doctoral path, but also to become more
competitive in terms of employability and, particularly when
transferred to the work setting, more competent in regard to
industry expectations.
However, engineering curricula and programs are too
focused on the teaching and development of technical skills,
overlooking the importance of nontechnical skills [2,3].
Because the societal role of state-funded Higher Education
Institutions requires: a) increasing the number of available
positions and recruitment of PhD students; b) addressing the
expectations of industries and companies; and c) ensuring the
employability prospects for PhD candidates, engineering
education has to adopt a different strategy. PhD programs
need to move beyond the development of research skills in
order to prepare engineering students for a variety of
professional roles beyond in academic as well as non-
academic contexts. Many HEIs have started developing new
approaches to the design of doctoral curricula, and providing
formal training opportunities of transversal competencies,
focusing on expanding the efficiency, relevance and overall
quality of their doctoral programs [45,49,57]. These
approaches need to be explicit in promoting the development
of soft skills that are transferable to a wider set of professional
roles and careers. The inclusion of soft skills in the curriculum
must be encouraged by the sector, and engineering educators
must to be supported – HEI’s need to help engineering
educators balance the different demands of engineering
curricula [3] and provide adequate training to teach these skills
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These changes could be supported by an active community
of educators and researchers in engineering education. We
would welcome the establishment of a network dedicated to
the research and teaching of transversal competencies [17] in
Portuguese engineering HEIs. This network could adopt some
of the international best practices of doctoral students’
development, such as Vitaes’ Researcher Development
Framework (RDF) [58]. This framework could guide the
development of an Engineering Doctoral Researcher
transversal and transferable skills program.
Future research using bibliometric analysis will expand
the search protocol to include studies related to specific areas
of engineering doctoral education, for example, engineering
design/curricula, as this could result in a different set of
publications and more nuanced clusters that were not
captured in the current study.
In the future, research should move into the direction of
creating a common framework and guidelines to implement
soft skills training for engineering PhD graduates and
assessment informed industry input and skill requirements.
This is important if Universities are to spearhead education in
the transition to the knowledge society [59].
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