Future engineers’ needed competencies for achieving the SDGs: the gap between academic and industry requirements

Résumé En

There is an overarching consideration in all engineering fields that graduate engineers have to be able to face important sustainability challenges in their future professional life and they will play a key role in addressing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ established by the United Nations in 2015. As a consequence, sustainable development competencies are increasingly a central consideration for graduate engineers to prepare them to meet these challenges. Despite this broadening place of sustainability development in engineering education, there is no consensus in the educational litterature about the question which are the relevant sustainability competencies for future engineers to meet SDGs. The main purpose of this paper to investigate how this question is answered by academic people and industry employers and compare their perceptions. We carried out in the context of the A-STEP 2030 European Project two exploratory focus groups study with academic people and industry employers’ representatives in France. Our findings indicate, on one side, a highly significant difference concerning the sustainability goals awareness and relevance between academic and industry participants. On the other side, a relatively good convergence about the needed engineering competencies for meeting SDGs. There were a general agreement on the fact that technical skills and knowledge are well integrated in French engineering schools curricula. However, we observed an important gap between academic and industry groups concerning the inclusion of transversal skills and competencies needed for sustainability development into engineering programs. Our findings suggest the integration of transversal sustainability competencies in a more comprehensive and transversal way into engineering curricula by an increased use of interdisciplinary project-based learning carried out in a real work context based on a close collaboration between industry and academia.