Focusing the Gap Between Teaching Profile and Professional Skills

The continued globalization of manufacturing and service delivery has led to a concomitant globalization of the engineering profession. Engineers increasingly engage in international projects, including service on multinational teams at different points around the globe, collaborating on a common project through real-time, electronic communication. Effective collaboration requires not only the ability of participants to communicate in a common language, but also the assurance of a common level of technical understanding. Such issues are not trivial, given the global diversity of systems for educating engineers, for different goals in skills, for quality control of their education, and for regulating their professional practice. From the engineering education perspective, the accreditation and assessment of academic programmes is vital in order to maintain the quality and the status of engineering graduates, and hence the technical workforce. Results of a survey of the relevant literature and observations indicate that various accreditation models have been developed regionally, as well as internationally but most of these models seem to be non-uniform, too complex, non-transparent and, moreover, difficult in their application. This leads to confusion and growing concerns about the mutual recognition and global mobility of the engineering profession. As a result, there is an urgent need for a systematic and shared global model of engineering accreditation that can be used to assess global professional skills and attributes of engineering graduates. The aim of the current paper is double. While on the one hand it presents the added value of the EUR-ACE accreditation system as a European best practice example to encourage the mobility of engineering graduates, on the other one it presents a survey on the graduates’ opinion on the level of training in the different technical and non-technical areas, comparing the teaching profile with the actual needs of the professional working environments. The survey was carried out in August 2012 by the International Relations Office of the School of Engineering (University of Florence) as preliminary activity to the EUR-ACE accreditation of two curricula.