Professional competencies in engineering education: the PREFERed-way

Professional competencies vary across engineering job characteristics. The design of the educational environment should take into account this diversity and enable students to develop career awareness. The European project PREFER (Professional Roles and Employability for Future EngineeRs) has developed instruments to make engineering students aware of the existence of professional roles and their associated competency profiles. These are designed and validated in strong interaction with industry, guaranteeing a discipline-independent, future-proof framework that is ready to implement in the engineering curriculum. In this paper, we describe the integration of this framework in the Faculty of Engineering Technology of KU Leuven, Belgium. The selection of professional competencies based on professional roles, the adaptive level of the professional competencies thanks to electives and the collaborative assessment of the students by experts in professional competencies and experts in technological competencies, are key elements of the new engineering curriculum. All of them are developed thanks to a university-business collaboration. The reformed curriculum will start from the academic year 2020-2021.