Engineering education for competence and commitment

Summary

Professional engineers require competence and commitment (2 Cs) to practice. The 2 Cs are of great importance for everyone in society. The 2 Cs are underpinned by three main things: 1) knowledge: - acquired while undertaking programmes of study at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and accumulated in industry; 2) skills either developed at HEIs and mastered in industry or developed and mastered in industry; and 3) values - either developed by completion of programmes of study and internalised at HEIs or developed and internalised in industry.

HEIs are responsible for supporting the formation of professional engineers by taking student engineers through curricula that maximise knowledge possessed, skills developed and values developed on completion of programmes of study. There is evidence to suggest that many HEIs within and across nations fulfil this responsibility with less than perfect levels of success and this of course undermines the performance of engineers at least in the short term.

In order to facilitate better levels of performance of engineers, researchers in this project will be seeking to address a combination of two or more of the following: evaluating engineering curricula, developing improvements to engineering curricula, developing tools (technology and/or policy related) to improve the 2 Cs and investigating relationships between attributes of engineering curricula and performance of engineers.

Applicants to research degree programmes should normally have at least a first class or an upper second class British Bachelors Honours degree (or equivalent) in an appropriate discipline. The criteria for entry for some research degrees may be higher, for example, several faculties, also require a Masters degree. Applicants are advised to check with the relevant School prior to making an application. Applicants who are uncertain about the requirements for a particular research degree are advised to contact the School or Graduate School prior to making an application.

The minimum English language entry requirement for research postgraduate research study is an IELTS of 6.0 overall with at least 5.5 in each component (reading, writing, listening and speaking) or equivalent. The test must be dated within two years of the start date of the course in order to be valid. Some schools and faculties have a higher requirement.