2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The paper covers a narrative literature review of the impact of using artificial intelligence (AI) to teach engineering undergraduates industry professional skills and the potential to close the academia-to-industry skills gap in engineering.
The background for the research topic involves training engineering undergraduates to enter the workforce well-prepared. The academia-to-industry skills gap in engineering has existed for many years, namely in the areas of communication, teamwork, professionalism, project management, etc., collectively called professional skills [1], [2]. Typically, these industry skills or “how to act like an engineer” skills are typically taught in the senior-level capstone type of classes [4]. There is a compelling purpose of engineering education to prepare students to meet industry needs [1], [2], [3].
Engineering students may be better trained to enter industry if more engineering industry skills are taught starting in the first year of an undergraduate degree rather than the traditional senior-level focus to increase student’s fluency in their professional skills. Students may feel more prepared to enter the engineering industry if they have been taught both the technical and professional skills throughout their entire undergraduate degree plan [2], [3].
Previous research surrounding the engineering readiness gap has covered topics such as active, collaborative, and project-based learning in which students are expected to complete a solution to an engineering problem while working in teams. The traditional coursework in an engineering undergraduate degree plan teaches technical and core classes in a sequence while later introducing capstone projects in the senior year. The proficiency of concepts such as teamwork, communication, project management, and professionalism are expected to be used in senior-level engineering design classes but may not have been emphasized through the traditional sequential coursework, especially until the senior year.
This literature review will look at the use of AI in developing professional skills in engineering undergraduate education. The rapid, increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help solve engineering problems as a collaboration tool is starting to be used in engineering classrooms, but usually on a limited scale. Using AI as prompts to help students write papers or laboratory reports is starting to emerge in undergraduate engineering programs. Using AI to teach or enhance professional skills seems to be a newer area of research [4]. The general impact of AI in communication skills training has been studied [5], [6], but the specific application to engineering is less abundant in the literature.
The significance of using AI in the engineering classroom to help develop professional skills will be reviewed to see if the idea can help to close the engineering readiness gap. The purpose of the research is to use synthesis and gap finding techniques in the literature review. The literature review topic will ask how have engineering educators used AI tools in the classroom to help enhance students’ proficiency of professional skills while specifically reviewing in what levels of classes the AI tools were being used in engineering education curriculum to enhance professional skills. Also, how the professional skills were measured in the classroom will be included in the review.