2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress research paper investigates how professional skills are developed on engineering project teams. Project teams, or engineering competition teams, are co-curricular student organizations that design and build a system based on competition guidelines that are typically set by engineering organizations. After the system is built there is usually a competition element that takes place between university teams. Professional skills are the non-technical abilities that individuals utilize to succeed in the professional world (e.g. communication, time management, creativity). Previous research has investigated the types, benefits, and necessity of professional skills for engineering students. Meanwhile many extra- and co-curricular activities, including project teams, have been cited as opportunities for students to develop professional skills. Even though these organizations are now popular amongst universities, the mechanisms in project teams that assist in the development of these skills are yet to be understood.

Undergraduate engineering students who were active members of project teams at a large, historically white, research-intensive, public institute in the Midwest were interviewed. Prior to the interview, students completed a survey. The survey, guided by the Student Involvement Framework (Fisher et al., 2017), asked students to select the skills they associated with their experience on project teams. Based on the survey information, semi-structured interviews were conducted with two students from different project teams. The interviews focused on the students’ experiences on project teams and the development of professional skills. The student responses were transcribed and coded based on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) (Kolb, 1984, 2015) to examine the types of actions students have done to develop professional skills.