The Globally Competent Engineer – What Different Stakeholders Say About Educating Engineers for a Globalized World

The world is becoming more and more globalized. That has an important impact on the working environment of engineers. Designing, producing and distributing products either in international companies, in international working-teams or at least for international markets is part of today’s economic reality. Even if goods have been sold or purchased all over the globe for centuries now, today’s markets have been grown closer together than ever. This is the potential working environment engineering students are facing. In contrast to that engineering education still is very local oriented. The number of international courses or even programs in which the students can train to act in intercultural settings is small in comparison to the amount of engineering courses at universities. Changing this imbalance means developing possibilities to train globally competent engineers in local educational systems. An essential step in this work is to define the globally competent engineer itself. What are competences or attributes graduates need in order to act successfully in international contexts? Answering this question the paper takes three sequential steps. First of all the term “intercultural competence” will be discussed. In a second step a literature research on attributes of globally acting engineers will be shown. Finally official documents of four accreditation agencies for engineering programs will be analyzed with focus on international aspects. By doing so four central areas of intercultural competence that are related to engineering can be identified: (International) communication, understanding of the engineering profession in a global context, (international) teamwork and ethical reasoning. In the conclusion all three steps will be connected and a catalogue of four central competences will be discussed.