The field of engineering evolves rapidly and universities face the challenge of preparing graduates with the competencies needed for the profession. To guide these efforts, clear, broadly applicable, and practical competence frameworks are needed. While numerous frameworks exist, no widely accepted model has emerged. Given the varying quality of these frameworks, which can overwhelm universities that aim to address this issue, this study provides an in-depth examination of non-technical competence frameworks for engineers. A systematic literature review of the most frequently cited peer-reviewed competence frameworks was conducted, and a total of 40 publications were thematically analysed. Four broad types of competence frameworks emerged – global, professional, generic, and sustainability competence. While there were differences between them, similarities also became apparent, such as an emphasis on social intelligence and information literacy. However, many frameworks also shared problems that could hinder their impact, such as a lack of contextual adaptability or practical indicators. Based on these findings, the study proposes core attributes for an ideal framework to guide educational efforts to integrate non-technical competencies into engineering education.

The 21st century has placed new professional demands on engineers as a result of global economic, social, environmental, and technological developments. As a result, engineering institutions have been under pressure to evolve their curricula to better prepare students for their future professions. Industry and academic scholarship have long recognized that engineering education must foster global competence in students, but the complexity of the concept may make its integration challenging. Despite its proliferation in educational literature, the concept is still in its infancy, which is connected to a lack of practical experience and empirical data for informed decisions. Considering that global competence learning may be a foreign concept to traditional technical and science education, there is a risk that well-intentioned but overeager efforts may not lead to the desired learning outcomes. These considerations guided the research project presented here, which examines global competence education for engineering students with the aim of developing an empirical foundation for advancing practical institutional engagement with the issue. Recognizing the need for a solid conceptual foundation at the basis of any efforts, it revolves around three main themes of global competence education for engineers: conceptions of core global competencies for engineers, their development, and their assessment.

These themes are addressed by synthesizing the insights of five studies that combine a large-scale review of engineering institutions’ practical efforts, a comparison of competence frameworks, stakeholder evaluations of competence importance, and the experiences and perspectives of engineering students and educators. Synthesizing the insights of these studies, this thesis first addresses the concept of global competence and its contents by providing a detailed conceptualization of global competence including a definition and core competencies, and examines what it means to be globally competent. Moreover, it addresses the issue of global competence learning at engineering institutions by providing a proposal for an institutional strategy for global competence efforts, which was developed by combining insights into institutional global competence efforts with stakeholder experiences and perspectives. In this regard, this thesis complements its empirical investigation with more practical contributions, and may serve as a valuable foundation for further theoretical and practical engagement with global competence education.

Globala ekonomiska, sociala, miljömässiga och tekniska förändringar under 2000-talet har lett till nya krav på ingenjörer. För att möta dessa och förbereda studenter för framtida yrkesverksamhet måste lärosäten anpassa innehållet i sina utbildningar. Såväl industri som forskning har i denna kontext länge betonat vikten av utbildning i global kompetens, men implementering av sådan undervisning har visat sig vara svårt, delvis på grund av begreppets komplexa natur. Trots en ökad förekomst inom utbildningsvetenskaplig litteratur befinner sig begreppet fortfarande i ett relativt tidigt skede, kopplat till en brist på praktisk erfarenhet och empiriska data som grund för väl underbyggda beslut. Eftersom global kompetens dessutom fortfarande kan uppfattas som främmande för traditionell teknisk och naturvetenskaplig utbildning finns också en risk att välmenande försök inte leder till önskade lärandemål. Detta är bakgrunden till det forskningsprojekt som presenteras här och som undersöker utbildning i global kompetens för ingenjörsstudenter med syfte att bidra till att utveckla en empirisk bas för att främja praktiskt institutionellt engagemang i frågan. Med beaktande av behovet av en stark konceptuell grund fokuserar projektet på tre kärnteman inom global kompetensutbildning för ingenjörer: kärnkompetenser för ingenjörer, samt utveckling och bedömning av dessa.

Fem delstudier tar sig an temana från olika håll: en granskning av praktiska insatser inom ingenjörsutbildningar, en jämförelse av olika kompetensramverk, utvärderingar från intressenter om värdet av olika kompetenser, samt erfarenheter och perspektiv från ingenjörsstudenter och lärare. Genom att förena insikter från dessa studier närmar sig avhandlingen begreppet global kompetens och dess innehåll genom en fördjupad analys av begreppets innehåll, inklusive en definition och identifiering av centrala kompetenser, samt en undersökning av vad det innebär att vara globalt kompetent. Vidare behandlas frågan om hur global kompetens kan utvecklas inom ramen för ingenjörsutbildningar och ett förslag till en institutionell strategi för sådant utvecklingsarbete presenteras, baserat på empiriska insikter om lärosätens kompetensinitiativ och olika intressenters erfarenheter och uppfattningar. Genom att avhandlingens empiriska analys på så sätt kompletteras med mer tillämpade bidrag kan den utgöra en potentiellt betydelsefull grund för fortsatt teoretisk och praktisk utveckling av utbildning för global kompetens.

Higher engineering institutions strive towards educating globally competent students, and this article examines curricular approaches to global competence education. Based on qualitative interviews, it explores engineering educators’ perspectives on student preparedness, their experiences with global competence integration, and their attributions of responsibility for such learning. In its findings, the article highlights educators’ doubts about engineering graduates’ preparedness for global workplaces. Moreover, it retraces a variety of educators’ approaches to integrating global competence learning and highlights the challenges they face in this endeavour. The article further shows how engineering educators perceived global competence education as important and acknowledged their own role in supporting it, but attributed the main responsibility for ensuring students’ competence development to institutional management. The article concludes with a discussion on the potential consequences of the educators’ perceptions and examines possibilities for a strategic institutional approach to global competence education.

Engineering curricula need to integrate global competence learning to ensure that graduates can succeed in globalised labour markets. In this context, this study examines disciplinary engineering courses, focusing on the key characteristics of globally competent educators and teaching approaches in terms of learning environments and course activities from the students’ perspective. We conducted focus group discussions with 28 students from different engineering disciplines to learn more about their perceptions and experiences. The results suggest that they felt that integrated global competence learning would require educators to demonstrate open-mindedness, a global mindset, and strong social skills. In addition, global competence teaching approaches were associated with learning environments that were described as engaging, inclusive, and student-centered, and with course activities that were related to real-world situations, included collaborative elements, and were facilitated and supported by the instructor. This study contextualises the idea of global competence in engineering education and provides valuable insights into students’ perspectives and experiences with its integration during their studies. It also critically examines students’ ideas and suggestions about opportunities for such learning in relation to educational science, and suggests a way forward for global competence in engineering education.

Global competence has become a popular concept for engineering institutions around the world. Despite its recent emergence and still vague characteristics, it has been widely adopted by institutions aiming to prepare globally minded graduates. However, the concept’s elusive and complex nature requires careful consideration in order to lead to impactful learning. This study provides a comprehensive overview of engineering institutions’ practical efforts to foster global competence learning. Guided by a systematic literature review covering the last two decades, it provides a comprehensive account of work related to the concept. The study first explores institutions’ practical efforts to promote global competence development, highlighting the most popular institutional approaches, including intercultural collaborations, mobility experiences, internationalization at home activities, and virtual collaborations. Furthermore, it critically analyzes how the concept is translated into practice, showing that practical efforts often lack guiding conceptualizations or reliable outcome assessments. To provide a thorough overview of institutional engagement with global competence, the study also highlights the geographical contexts of the universities involved in such efforts, as well as related chronological trends and developments, before concluding with reflections on the future of global competence education.

University graduates capable of addressing global challenges require a sense of global citizenship and the ability to understand, communicate, and work effectively and appropriately with people from different backgrounds. Linguistic diversity comprises a crucial cultural asset, yet the Englishisation of higher education and the emergence and development of text-generating tools may drastically reduce the perceived importance of language learning. This paper is empirically based on the analysis of two text-based datasets from course participants in a teacher training course (n=19) and a lifelong learning course (n=52), looking for examples of experiences, plans, and attitudes towards multilingualism in educational settings. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of a specific focus on students’ linguistic diversity as a vehicle for cultural and global competence learning, and offer suggestions for an institutional approach to empowering teachers, staff and students to enable this change. Finally, we emphasise the need for empirical studies to understand how multiculturalism and multilingualism can be effectively integrated into higher education, and we highlight the implementation of a recently adopted policy on multilingualism and multiculturalism by one of the European University Alliances as a promising area for future research.

The need to equip students with the competencies needed to appropriately and effectively communicate and work together with people from different backgrounds – in this paper referred to as ‘global competence’ – is certainly not a new one, but one which has attracted more and more attention in the wake of technological advances, labour market changes, and various globalizing processes.

Yet, for a long time, technical universities tended to turn a blind eye to the need for curriculum development, often tacitly hoping that international mobility would ‘take care’ of this weak link in study programmes heavily dominated by technical subjects. The fact that all but the most ambitious universities failed to include more than a fraction of its students in international mobility made this a flawed reasoning to start with, but by now this insight is also combined with a new awareness of how the coveted linguistic, communicative and cultural (LCC) competence development does not develop spontaneously by itself, in however culturally diverse surroundings, but need to be systematically supported, through curricula design, and by globally competent educators and staff.

To better understand the educational thinking and experiences of the stakeholders most crucially involved, a consortium with researchers from three European universities conducted a comparative study of perceptions and expectations using an internationally distributed survey carried out in 2022 (n=860), targeting educators (n=192), students (n=329), and alumni (n=339). In this paper, we focus on a comparison of students' and educators’ views on programme/curriculum content, resources, and opportunities relevant for developing global competence, and their perceived effectiveness. Apart from a critical look at the current state of affairs, we want to draw attention to perceptual discrepancies between the views of educators and students, highlighting the need for better integration of global competence education in engineering programmes. We will also explore internal differences within these two groups, based on geographical and disciplinary backgrounds.

Our project’s ultimate goal is to formulate well-grounded and practically applicable recommendations for integrated linguistic, communicative, and cultural training in support of optimized global competence education at engineering and technical universities, and we hope with this paper to provide not only an updated understanding of the educational landscape, but also some hands-on recommendations for educational change.

Upon graduation, engineering graduates will find themselves in diverse, interconnected, and fast-paced work environments. Global competence, which encompasses different types of knowledge, skills and attitudes, is what will help them navigate successfully through the variety of situations they may encounter. Accordingly, its development should be an integrated core aspect of today’s engineering education. Acknowledging the problems with current approaches to doing so – in particular, the vagueness of the concept and the issues of prioritizing learning content in already crowded curricula - this paper compares the perceived need and value of specific competencies according to key stakeholders. Based on a previous literature review, a survey focusing on a set of 15 frequently mentioned competences was developed and distributed internationally. The perspectives of three types of stakeholders - engineering professionals (n=339), educators (n=200), and students (n=331) – were collected and broadly analyzed according to the perceived importance of the competencies. Overall, we found agreement among the stakeholder groups, and the majority of our proposed competences were perceived as either important or very important by the respondents. Among the competences, teamwork and collaboration and English language skills stood out, while other language skills were perceived as less important. Comparing the groups, we found that professionals tended to value several social competences more highly and subject-specific competences less highly than academic stakeholders. In our discussion, we offer possible explanations for these findings, which allow inferences for educational change towards a more globally competent higher engineering education.

Engineering graduates are increasingly expected to possess a certain level of global competence to work in the diverse and intercultural collaborations of the modern profession. With stringent programme curricula and educators being technical – and not global learning – experts, higher education institutions (HEIs) often look at international student mobility as the solution for preparing students for culturally diverse working environments. Nevertheless, literature and widely shared experience have identified two major shortcomings of international mobility: low degree of participation, and lack of insights into actual learning outcomes of international student mobility. Our work aims to address these issues by exploring students’ perspectives on international mobility experiences. A student survey collecting the voices of 639 students from more than 30 countries provides insights into the motivation for (and against) participation, support received, as well as the challenges encountered by students on their way to international mobility experiences, and also reveals the students’ perceptions of opportunities for global competence development in their host countries. Based on the students’ experiences, we can provide suggestions for how international student mobility could be redesigned in order to better support and enhance global competence development among students.

Global competence is an essential attribute for engineering graduates working in an interconnected and culturally diverse world, and higher engineering education needs to adapt to ensure that their students will acquire it before entering the labor market. For universities, the only way to ensure comprehensive global competence learning for all students is the holistic integration of related learning outcomes throughout curricula – which requires engineering educators to be able to (re)design their courses and programs accordingly. Considering that most engineering educators are subject experts of their discipline – but lay people when it comes to such competencies – we set out to compile a practical guideline for those wanting to integrate global competence learning within their disciplinary courses. Following a participatory action research approach, we connected our own insights as global competence educators at a technical university with those of several cohorts of engineering educators and students enrolled in global competence courses. Synthesizing these insights, we could identify four essential lessons for integrated global competence learning: 1) learning opportunities can be found (nearly) everywhere, 2) relevance and authenticity must be emphasized, 3) theory and practice need to be integrated and 4) global competence cannot be taught, but it can be learnt. These lessons are illustrated with practical examples for fostering global competence learning in regular engineering courses.