Having spent my formative years working on a large European project tasked with identifying critical skillsets for engineers I can tell you, the area of skills research can be a bit of a swamp. Our conception of an engineer is that of an effective problem solver, an innovator, and even a creative thinker. But what about the less technical aspects of being an engineer?

Well that really depends on who you ask. We all have our wish lists of skills and competences we want an engineer to be able to demonstrate; result orientated, client focused, good attention to detail, someone who can take a “helicopter view” of a problem. But is it realistic to expect all engineers to be able to demonstrate these skills? Is there a core to the “soft” skills, or are they more subtly nuanced? By the way, I have to take exception to the word, “soft”. These are people skills. The skills that we and our engineers need to collaborate with others and communicate effectively with the world around us. Moreover, two decades of research into engineering practice has shown us that when we look at the day-to-day tasks that an engineer is engaged with, most of their time is occupied working with clients, other engineers and managers, and only about a tenth of their time is spent doing what we typically attribute to an engineering role: design and innovation. So if my small rant has proved anything, it’s that I’m quite passionate about the human aspect of engineering and the skills that engineers require to interact with others and the world around them, but how can we pin down exactly what those skills are? They seem elusive, fluffy in some sense and although they aren’t discrete, we can observe them and even define them.  

There are plenty of ways to identify these skills and many people have tried from the engineering profession and academia alike. There’s a strong temptation to start making shopping lists of skills with little regard for the practical activities that engineers find themselves engaging with. Trust me, I’ve been there. The problem with these lists is they’re rarely accompanied by the behaviours that you would expect someone to demonstrate and rarely are the key stakeholders actively engaged in formulating them. I’m going to present an approach that will hopefully get you closer to a true sense of what’s happening within your own organisation. It’s the approach I inevitably took, and I found good success and buy-in when I adopted it.  

So why wouldn’t we start by making a list of skills? Because there are already as many lists as there are people to make them and they rarely capture the subtleties of life in an engineering-led organisation. That said, there are some well formulated lists that have what we’re looking for; sets of skills with demonstrable behaviours associated with them. The Harvard University Competence Dictionary is a set of thirty skills with between 3-7 key actions that an individual can exhibit to demonstrate their competence. Similarly, the Engineers Ireland competences for the title of Chartered Engineer provide a good starting point, with clear and measurable actions that can be taken to demonstrate ones competence.  

Great, we have our list, off we go and apply it across the organisation to every engineer and manager. Well, not quite. The next step is to get people in the room. HR, L&D, senior leadership and engineers from all levels and engineering functions. Be as nuanced as is appropriate for the scale of your organisation. For organisations with ten engineers one focus group may suffice, organisations with one hundred or more may consider several group discussions. Once you have everyone in the room, now it’s time to shop. But we’re not here to fill our carts, get each member of your panel to pick 3-4 competences that they deem to be essential for them to do their job. The beauty of having the behaviours associated with each means there’s less room for ambiguity in their choices. Once everyone has had a chance to pick their top 3-4, open the floor to discussion and ask that the panel select a top ten together. As I said before, this can be as nuanced as you see fit, in a smaller organisation your top ten might be your core competences for the entire organisation. In an organisation of one hundred or more, each panel may get sub-divided by engineering function and seniority.  

But in either case, what has been achieved by engaging with this process and why would you invest your time in doing this? Well to my mind, it’s giving the people in your organisation two things. The first is a new perspective on the roles within the organisation, this activity is as much a learning opportunity for HR and L&D professionals as it is for the engineers and management. It gives engineers a compass to navigate their career in terms of demonstrable and measurable competences and beyond that, it gives them a road map to more senior positions once the results of your panel discussions are merged into a cohesive whole i.e., a set of core competences or a competence framework. The second thing that it provides is a sense of self-determinism and agency; that your engineers not only feel they’re being listened to, but that they have an oar, to steer their career within your organisation.  

There is always temptation to read skill reports and try to make the “top 10 skills for engineers” fit within your own organisation, it’s the perceived path of least resistance. But these skills are meaningless if they don’t reflect the business environment they exist within and the day-to-day practices of your engineers. I hope that this article has provided you with more than any comprehensive list of skills ever could, there’s a Chinese proverb in here about teaching people to fish…  

Darren Carthy, Ph.D.

Darren works with Engineers Ireland as a Continued Professional Development (CPD) executive, auditing and providing support to engineering lead organisations who hold or wish to hold the CPD employer standard, a framework of best practices in Learning & Development (L&D). Darren is passionate about research and practice in L&D, particularly curriculum design, test development and assessment and was awarded his PhD in engineering education by TU Dublin in 2021. Darren has a number of publications relating to the career-readiness of engineering graduates in the proceedings of conferences & symposia, and journal articles. He has presented his research to both industry stakeholders in Ireland, Belgium & the Netherlands and to academics in the UK, Denmark, Hungary & the Netherlands alike. Darren is a member of the Irish Institute of Training and Development (IITD) and his focus over the next 3-5 years is on becoming a chartered member of IITD and to continue to publish primary research in educational assessment.