© 2021 EPFL/ /Alain Herzog - While it is important for students to work in groups during their studies, that is not enough for them to acquire many of the transversal skills needed in the professional world. A recent EPFL study highlights the need for engineering courses to explicitly address professional skills through a combination of theory and feedback. When it comes to soft skills like project planning, communicating and risk assessing, there is often a gap between the employer's expectation and what engineering graduates bring to the table. Engineering schools could do more to prepare their graduates for the job market by incorporating these skills into their curricula. Various kinds of team-based projects are used to address this challenge, but a new study clarifies which approaches work best. "Although team-based projects are very common in engineering programs, we do not really know to what extent students learn professional skills from this type of experience," says Cyril Picard, a PhD candidate at EPFL's Laboratory for Applied Mechanical Design. For his thesis, he looked at what approaches could promote the development of these skills among engineering students.
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