2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The University of Calgary recently updated its software engineering curriculum to be more aligned with the technical skills needed to be successful in industry. This new curriculum also integrated a project spine – a project-based course in each year, culminating with the capstone project in their final year. This is meant to integrate professional and technical skills into the curriculum to better prepare our students for the challenges they will face post-university. Based on feedback received in recent stakeholder discussions, students have sufficient technical knowledge, but are missing crucial interpersonal skills that are not necessarily emphasized in their academic journey. The goal of the project-based courses is to help resolve this problem, but the initial development of these courses has focused more on the technical content, with the required professional development content being taught separately from the technical content. As an example, the third-year course in this project spine is meant to teach the students about software engineering industry practices and communication. In the first iteration of this course, the only professional content was related to innovation, ethics in design and entrepreneurial mindset, and was only minimally covered towards the end of the semester. This course provides an excellent opportunity to teach students the interpersonal skills needed in industry, as this course is taught in the last semester before most of the students leave for a 12–16-month internship. As the software engineering program director, I have also observed that students lack the ability to be resilient to manage and overcome adversities. The goal of this project is to not only integrate more professional development content and interpersonal skills, but to get students to reflect on their engineering journey and think about their engineering identity, to help them gain confidence and build resilience.

This paper will cover the initial stage of this project, which includes two parts. The first part is a review of the current practices for integrating professional development into the classroom and research on engineering identity, while reflecting on my own experience as an engineering student. The second part will cover how the professional development content will be integrated into this course. The goal is to incorporate different assessments that require the students to practice various skills and to reflect on their experiences. The proposed assessments include getting the students to practice teamwork by completing peer coding feedback exercises, practice communication skills by hosting mock work meetings and participating in a mock pitch competition, and to complete reflection assignments on their engineering identity and academic experiences. The engineering identity framework used here will focus on helping the students to identify what they think is an engineer, how they think their traits and skills overlap with their idea of an engineer, and what skills or traits they feel there are lacking. The results from the reflections will be used to inform future skills integration into the curriculum.