DOI 10.2478/cplbu-2014-0017
The 6th Balkan Region Conference on Engineering and Business Education &
The 5th International Conference on Engineering and Business Education &
The 4th International Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Sibiu,
Romania,
October, 18th – 21st, 2012
ENGINEERING EDUCATION IN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL
COMMUNICATION – CHECKING COURSE IMPACT
Yolanda - Mirela, Catelly
Politehnica University Bucharest – FILS – DCLM, yolandamirelacatelly@yahoo.com
ABSTRACT: In the increasingly interconnected contemporary society, employers commonly expect the engineering graduates to
possess, alongside academic success evidence, a range of soft skills, of which scientific and technical communication, particularly in
a language of international circulation, ranks first. This demand has led to creating and implementing a modular flexible Scientific
and Technical Communication in English - STCE original course of the CLIL (content and language integrated) type. The paper aim
is to evaluate the course impact, with a view to increasing its effectiveness and success by further amendments. This has been done
by designing research, based on triangulating questionnaires and interviews addressed to both graduates who took (or not) the STCE
course during their Master’s or Doctoral education, as well as to their employers.
Key words engineering education, scientific and technical communication, STCE
1. CONTEXTUALIZING THE STCE COURSE
RATIONALE,
DESIGN
AND
IMPLEMENTATION - GROUNDWORK
Graduates of higher education technical institutions have to
face at present a series of expectations from the job market,
whether they are looking for employment in engineering and/or
business organizations or in education and/or research.
They are expected to possess a range of significant skills that
can enable them to communicate both in writing and orally.
This phenomenon is valid worldwide, in a society that has
undergone the effects of globalization, and which requires a
higher mobility of (young) skilled work force.
As not only research studies but also the media maintain,
engineers in both business and technological environments are
expected to develop what has generically been called in recent
years soft abilities, as maintained, among others, by Kotler [5].
As opposed to the strictly technical hard ones, soft skills have
received various labels in various countries, which are listed by
Nor [6] as: key skills (UK); essential skills (New Zealand);
employability skills (Australia, Canada); workplace know-how
(USA), transferable skills (France) etc.
Irrespective of their name, skills can be grouped under three
main lines of competences, according to Sharatkumar [7], viz.
Communication skills, Psychology and Subject matter
knowledge. This is a useful division when they come under
focus in the process of training learners at university level or
later, in the employing company.
As Ziegler [10] points out, currently we can note that there is
an acute insufficiency in the engineering graduates’ soft skills.
It is also shown that a job candidate possessing good technical
(hard) abilities but who is lacking soft ones, such as
communication, has definitely lower chances to get a job today.
Already in 2002 a representative of a powerful automotive
industry employer [1] would emphasize that soft skills should
be included in the engineering education of the future
specialists as a must, not only for those who would work in
industrial companies or in business ones, but equally in R&D.
According to Clemmer [4], in recent years soft skills,
calculated as a quotient, account for an engineer’s productivity
up to the very high rate of 85%, as compared to the low 15%
attributed to the hard abilities contribution in this respect,
particularly under economic recession conditions.
Youth mobility on the job market is strictly connected with the
level of soft skills of the engineering and/or business graduates
– a phenomenon that is growing fast in most domains of
activity. It is therefore imperative that engineering tertiary
education should anticipate the long term expectations and
needs of the very competitive job market and foster the
integration of soft skills oriented disciplines in the curriculum.
Recruiters will favour mainly those applicants who can
demonstrate that they can tip the scales in their favour as they
have developed the soft skills expected from them by most
employers, be they small, average or large companies. This has
been confirmed by authoritative sources such as the US Labour
Department [9], with over 450 employers admitting that: (i)
besides the fundamental hard skills, soft ones are more
important in the recruiting process, and (ii) most young
candidates dramatically lack them.
It is generally accepted that English is currently the
international language of communication, alongside German or
French – to a lower extent, which raises a complementary
challenge to the education in foreign languages at tertiary level:
it should not only develop undergraduates’ linguistic
competences, but also identify best ways and means of doing
this while teaching soft skills, such as communication in
writing/oral forms at the same time.
What is more, teachers of foreign languages and soft skills
should try to receive acceptance of the main stakeholders in the
instruction process in their educational contexts: university
management, curriculum developers at all levels in tertiary
education, the students and the potential employers.
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This can be obtained on the basis of appropriately principled
proposals from the pedagogical viewpoint, of implementing
courses whose efficiency and relevance must be demonstrated
by empirical research.
be for them as job applicants. Similarly, at these stages in their
education, the students will be able to easily transfer some of
the soft skills they might have already developed in their
mother tongue.
There are some countries, such as India, where this curricular
reshaping is already taking place, with a focus – according to
Clemmer [4] – on soft skills education based on modular
employable skills courses. However, this is not the generalized
policy of higher education organizations worldwide. In many
places, soft skills training is carried out by specialized training
firms upon request, but, although quite necessary, it is seldom
afforded by most employers. It may be of interest to analyze
one such prestigious training program, provided in the USA
[8], which offers units on: the spoken communication, the
written communication, handling meetings and the media,
a.s.o.
The course is among the few, if any, of this type in our country,
as well as in the repertory of specialized training firms in
Romania. It has been designed as a course, authored by Catelly
[3], taught based on electronic support, as well as its
corresponding applications and assignments, which also exist
in electronic format.
Against this needs and expectations general background, which
was valid both nationally and internationally in 2007, an
attempt to designing and implementing a Scientific and
Technical Communication in English – STCE course
emerged. We had in mind a CLIL (Content and Language
Integrated Learning) type of course, in an interdisciplinary
approach to the teaching of soft skills within the English
language course, a dual aim where the soft skills component is
communication in the fields of science and technology, with
the advantages that exposure to the foreign language takes
place during/together with the soft skills acquisition, which
solves the issue of requiring extra time in the curriculum.
The students – in general Master’s and/or Doctoral levels – use
English in order to acquire content, which is quite motivating
for them, as they fully understand how useful such skills will
The principles underlying the course design are those of an
eclectic approach to teaching, with a communicative core and a
modular structure comprising three parts: (i) linguistic support;
(ii) written communication; (iii) oral communication, allowing
room for flexibility in the selection of the units for each
particular group. Each part is divided into several ampler units
(14 altogether, making it adaptable to the university similar 14week term structure).
The final course structure – choice of units – has been based
on a baseline study carried out at the pre-course stage, which
comprises a thorough needs analysis, but readjustments are
always possible upon negotiation with the learners – and
indeed they took place on more than one occasion, with a view
to eliminating certain issues or adding new ones, such as poster
design and presentation at conferences (see Catelly [2] for an
ampler presentation of the manner in which the STCE course
was supplemented) or participating in video or telephone
conferences.
The students receive a course syllabus outline – an excerpt of
which is provided in Table 1.
Table 1. STCE COURSE BASIC SYLLABUS – Excerpt
Week
No.
5
Main Course Topic
Emphasized Aspects
Assignment
WRITTEN
COMMUNICATION - 1 – The
‘Tools”
Paragraph structure; Elements of Style and
Register; Emphasis on clarity, conciseness,
and accuracy of expression; Modes of
expression: descriptive, expository, narrative,
scientific; Level of formality; Avoiding biased
language
Main stages in the writing process; the
Audience; the Process of writing: Collecting
material; Planning; Outlining; Structuring;
Drafting; Editing; Visual aids; Proof reading
Structure of letters and memos; Email
Netiquette – Guidelines; Logical connectors
Developing a paragraph; analyzing
various text from the purpose and
structure point of view
Report types; Technical report structure:
procedure, results, discussion, conclusions,
and recommendations.
Main requirements in abstract writing Guidelines
Scientific journal article structure; main
requirements; citation issues; avoiding
plagiarism
Requirements of a PowerPoint presentation;
turning written content into oral presentation;
designing the appropriate visuals aids
Expressing personal opinions, ideas, arguing
etc.; Communication strategies/functions:
negotiating, contradicting, evaluating,
Technical report (300 words) in
specific professional context
6
WRITTEN
COMMUNICATION – 2 – The
‘Process’
7
WRITTEN
COMMUNICATION TEXT
TYPES – 3 – TECHNICAL
CORRESPONDENCE (e-mail
messages, memos, letters)
Written Communication Text
Types – 4 - REPORTS
8
9
10
11
12
Written Communication Text
Types – 5 - ABSTRACTS
Written Communication Text
Types – 6 - SCIENTIFIC
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Oral Communication – 1 –
PRESENTING A WRITTEN
PAPER IN A CONFERENCE
Oral Communication – 2 –
PARTICIPATING IN
TECHNICAL
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Writing two paragraphs with the
same content, adapting them to
different types of audience
Selecting appropriate type of
message to content to be
transmitted – writing of one e-mail
message, one memo and one letter
Abstract to a scientific article of the
student//of a colleague
Scientific journal article – acc. to
IEEE citation style.
PowerPoint slides for the scientific
article written in week 10 – delivery
of presentation (approx. 5 minutes)
Simulation of panel discussion on a
given topic
Week
No.
13
14
Main Course Topic
Emphasized Aspects
DISCUSSIONS/MEETINGS
Oral Communication – 3 –
MAKING A BRIEF ORAL
PRESENTATION
synthesizing etc.
- Guidelines for making an oral presentation;
Non-verbal communication; Dealing with
fear; Off-the-cuff presentations (without
preparation) – discussing feedback
- More guidelines for making an effective,
efficient, eloquent, and ethical oral
presentation
Oral Communication – 4 –
MAKING AN ORAL
PRESENTATION
Feedback is generally obtained throughout the course (teacher
– student discussions and Assignment Portfolios), and an End
of Course Evaluation Survey is administered to all the
participants.
The STCE course has been held for three Master’s profiles:
Electrical engineering, IT and Automatic translation, as well as
for one post-doctoral school (Electrical Engineering) in the
POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest - as a piloting stage.
Therefore, the aim of this paper is to find out about the course
impact, in order to:
• check to what extent it really meant an aid to the
participants;
• identify prompts that could be conducive to amending it so
as to better respond to the identified learners’ needs;
• analyze the relationship between the course structure and
the job market expectations.
2. CHECKING STCE COURSE IMPACT –
RESEARCH OUTLINE
In order to measure course impact, an empirical research
project was designed and carried out. The research objectives
were reflected in the working hypotheses formulated.
The main hypothesis states that if the students receive a STCE
type of course, then there are good chances that they should
meet the job market expectations better, i.e. the course impact
could be seen as good. To this, secondary hypotheses were
added, that refer to:
• the manner and quality level of the higher education
answer to the job market expectations by providing a STCE
course;
• the relationship between the engineering graduates’
expectations from the university in terms of being offered or
not a STCE course;
• the labour market approach to providing in-service soft
skills training courses versus their expectations from the
engineering job applicants, and, implicitly, their assumptions
that universities should equip graduates with such skills.
In order to collect data of both quantitative and qualitative
type, a range of instruments were created, namely:
a)
a STCE+ Graduate Questionnaire - meant for all the
author’s STCE course graduates in the university;
b) an ENG Graduate Questionnaire - meant for any technical
university graduates who did not receive the STCE course;
c) an EMPLOYER Questionnaire – meant for employers
(small, medium or large companies) that employ technical
university graduates.
The three questionnaires were structured based on four
common content questions, as shown in Table 2, to facilitate a
good triangulation of the answers, and thus to ensure a good
Assignment
An off-the-cuff oral presentation
(approx. 3 minutes)
A 10 - minute scientific oral
presentation based on trainee’s
research
validity of the research. Obviously, the corresponding
questions were formulated according to the profile of the
respondents to each of the questionnaires.
Table 2. Common questions to all questionnaires
Question about:
Qstce
Qeng
Qempl
Importance of STCE skills
Q1
Q1
Q1
STCE skills as must/asset in
Q2
Q2
Q2
hiring
Company policy in offering
Q4
Q4
Q4
STCE type courses
Ticking STCE skills useful
Q5
Q5
Q5
at job
The basic information envisaged in each of these four common
questions was the same, and it is essentially presented as
entries in Table 2. It should be noted that the list of skills the
respondents were asked to tick in Q5 – useful skills at job
actually represents the very content of the STCE course units,
as shown in the course syllabus in Table 1.
The questionnaires also included differentiated in point of
content questions, as shown in Table 3. Thus, in the STCE+
Questionnaire, Q3 is meant to obtain data about the parts of the
course which the graduates specifically needed to refresh after
getting employment, while Q6 aims to get information about
other soft skills they may need at job. The third question in the
ENG GRADUATE Questionnaire checks whether engineering
graduates who had not been given the course in faculty would
have considered it useful, as compared to the kind of course(s)
they actually took in faculty – checked by Q6. In the
EMPLOYER Questionnaire, the role of Q3 is to check the
general expectations of the job market that the job applicants,
graduates of technical universities, should possess or not
written/oral communication skills in English for the fields of
science and technology.
Table 3. Differentiated questions per questionnaire
Question:
Qstce Qeng Qempl
Have you used STCE course
Q3
materials as a resource after
course?
What other skills now
Q6
necessary to you at work would
you have liked to be taught at
the STCE course?
Would you have welcomed a
Q3
STCE type course in faculty?
What English courses were
Q6
taught to you in faculty
(type/duration/usefulness at
your current job)?
Do you expect that your newly
Q3
hired employees should have
written/oral communication
skills in English?
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The sampling of the persons answering the questionnaires is
represented by the STCE+ students of the author, whose email
addresses were easily recovered, and personal contacts who are
all technical university graduates – ex-students, fellow teachers
in the technical university and other engineers working in
various domains – for the ENG Graduate Questionnaire. As
regards the EMPLOYER Questionnaire, emails were sent
directly to a series of firms that presumably employ engineers,
or other contacts were used in order to collect answers. All the
questionnaires were sent by email, with an explanatory
message in the email field, in English, requiring them to
answer the attached questionnaires and also to disseminate
them to other potential respondents fulfilling the requirements
of the respondents’ profile, which actually increased the rate of
response.
A brief letter of transmittal to the respondent preceded the set
of questions in each questionnaire, specifying the rationale for
the questionnaire and guaranteeing the confidentiality of the
answers. As after the first emails the response was actually not
too high, a reminder email was sent to all the addressees,
raising the final response rates, which were as follows: 42% for
STCE+, with 30 answers, 77% for ENG, with 54 answers and
60% for EMPL, with 24 answers.
Certainly, the number of respondents is not as high as to ensure
more than an illustration of the main trends in the context
described. However, in spite of this limitation and of other
restricting aspects, such as the no-classes summer period when
it was administered or the rather short deadline up to which the
answers were expected, the general picture that the data
configure is able to fairly accurately approximate the course
impact. Moreover, some respondents added their own free
comments in an informal manner, on email or in discussions,
which also contributed to a better triangulation of the data.
In what follows, the data collected by means of each
questionnaire will be presented in turn, in order to facilitate
their comparison and, further on, the triangulation of findings
with a view to correctly interpreting their meaning.
Thus, as far as the STCE+ Questionnaire is concerned, 60% of
the respondents were from the Computer Science Master, 40%
graduated from the Automatic Translation Master and 10%
from the Electrical Engineering one. As expected, the domains
they are employed in range from a bulky IT zone, to some in
the aero/military industry and telecommunications, with only a
few in call centres or with retailers.
At job (Q1) their STCE skills are Important – 60% or Very
important – 40%. When they were hired (Q2), the STCE skills
were a must to a considerable extent for 70% (while for 20%
they were mandatory to a very high extent). For those who
answered that they were a must, naturally the answer to the
possibility that STCE skills should have been an asset upon
being hired became useless; however, it is mentioned by 70%
of them as an asset to a very high extent.
Only 20% of them felt the need to refresh their STCE course
input after being hired (Q3), among the aspects listed being:
email writing, grammatical rules, writing conventions in
general. As they graduated in very recent years – 2010 to 2012
– this percent seems to be normal. In 90% of cases, their
employers do not have it in their policy to provide training to
newly employed engineers.
As regards their answers to Q5 – the most frequently skills used
by them at job, these are: Technical and business
correspondence, always clustering around the 3. Frequently
and, mainly, 4. Very frequently values, with 30 - 40%, as well
as Participation in technical/business discussions – around 60 70% - again at levels 3 and 4 of frequency, as well as Making
oral presentations, which is seen as 3. Frequent by 60 % of the
respondents.
Other aspects necessary at job (Q6) produced the following
suggestions: technical translations (2 respondent), main
functions of speech used in discussions (4 respondents),
listening to examples of discussions (4 respondents). Finally,
although a direct evaluation of the STCE course
usefulness/relevance to their current job was not expressedly
required in the questionnaire, in answering Q6 around 30% of
the STCE+ respondents added remarks of the qualitative type,
clustered around a good appreciation of the course, for
instance: ‘the course has helped me and it will help me in the
future, too, in my career’, ‘the skills taught are enough for the
level of competence expected from me’, ‘the course was very
well structured, covering most areas of interest for us,
engineers’.
As regards the ENG Questionnaire, the years of graduation
were: 1985 – 1995 for 11%, 1996 – 2005 for 39% and 2005+
for the remaining 50%. Engineers who responded this
questionnaire are currently employed in: Research and
Education (approx.22%), while the rest of 78% have jobs in
technical areas in Industry, Business and Consultancy.
Under Q1 – they answer that the STCE skills at job are 4. Very
important – 72.2% or 3. Important – 16.6%. No respondent
answered 1. Not important, and only 11.1% considered they are
2. Relatively important. Upon hiring, STCE skills were seen as
a must: 4. To a very high extent – by 42.2% and as 3. To a
considerable extent – by 27.7% of the engineers, with quite
similar percentages for the second option: STCE skills seen as
an asset upon hiring. There were no answers under option 1.
Not at all a must or an asset. This is confirmed under Q3 – as
94.5% would have welcomed such a course in faculty. Among
the reasons they provide are: ‘ it would have taught me to
express myself more clearly’, ‘it would have been a plus in
getting hired’, ‘it would have helped me to carry out research’,
‘it would have given me technical language support’, ‘it is
essential, especially at managerial levels’.
As regards Q5 – the frequency of skills use at job, the results
should be analyzed with the taking into consideration of the
domain the respondents work in, which explains the 42.2% of
1. Never answers for Abstract writing and for Scientific
articles/papers writing, because only researchers and
professors do use the skills in such types of written
communication frequently, while the rest cluster with high
values for: Writing technical/business correspondence – 61.1%
do this 4. Very frequently, Reports – 50% of them do this 4.
Very frequently, Participating in technical/business discussions
– 50% with 4. Very frequently and, with 42.2% - Making oral
presentations also appears under option 4. Very frequently.
None of them took a STCE type of course in faculty – Q6; they
only list ‘standard’ or ‘traditional’ General Language courses,
or, in more recent years, ESP ones, making references to the
short duration of such courses, or their optional character.
The EMPLOYER Questionnaire was answered by
representatives of small companies – 22.2%, medium - 33.3%
and large companies – 44.4%, out of which over 80% came
from companies directly involved in industry/sales of technical
products, while the rest were research/education organizations.
55.5% answered that STCE skills are 4. Very important for
their employees, while 33.3% consider them 3. Important (Q1).
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Q2 – abilities of STCE type as are seen as a must or an asset
upon hiring people returned 55.5% seeing them as a must to 4.
A very high extent; similarly, 44.4% of employers consider
them an asset 3. To a considerable extent.
The companies’ expectations that the newly hired employees
should already have these skills are of over 90%. In correlation,
only 66.6% of the employers do have in-service training
courses in their current policy (Q4). Only two answers
mentioned that they offer Leadership or Professional
management soft skills courses, but no one actually offers
STCE type training.
The answers to Q5 depend to a high extent on the company
profile, with consistently high scores for Technical/business
correspondence and Participating in technical/business
discussions (55.5% - Very frequently), followed by Making
oral presentations – 33.3%, also Very frequently. The
respondents standing for research/education organizations
naturally included Abstract and Scientific Paper writing, which
thus raised the total for this item to 33.3% - as 3. Frequently
necessary.
The significance of the quantitative and qualitative data
obtained is discussed in the last section in order to check the
hypotheses and draw a range of conclusive guideposts that
could document our research and provide support in optimizing
the STCE course in the future.
3. DISCUSSION OF RESULTS AND OPEN
CONCLUSIONS
The triangulation of the questionnaires in terms of the common
content questions confirms the main hypothesis as a trend,
given the fact that both STCE course graduates and most
engineers actually make full use of their skills, or express a
need for them, respectively, which is also confirmed by the
high scores of frequency of use obtained for Q5 in all three
instruments.
In direct correlation, the high scores of frequency of use of the
various skills included in the STCE course structure (Q5) show
that the job needs of the engineering university future
graduates’, as suggested by the needs analysis conducive to
establishing the course modules and units topics, were quite
correctly estimated in most of the cases, which made the course
both relevant and useful for the students in their jobs, be they
in industry or in research. It is then a positive feature of the
course the fact that it was designed based on the principles of
modularity and flexibility, as the teacher could/can always
adapt the course by resetting priorities from case to case.
As a comment, the three Master’s groups to whom the STCE
course was taught had profiles requiring a number of
adjustments in order to match the needs of the trainees – and
this was done based on negotiations with the students and the
Directors of the Master’s courses. In this respect, new units
were designed and included in the course, for instance the
Poster making and presentation. The course allows the teacher
to thus allot different weighting in terms of focus and time to
those units that are most appropriate to the students’ medium
and long term interests.
As regards the analysis of the relationship between the work
market approach to employing engineers in our country and its
expectations from the engineering higher education as far as
the graduates’ soft skills of the STCE type is concerned, the
results confirm the fact that employers actually expect to a high
extent that job applicants should come from school endowed
with a wide range of soft skills. Moreover, under the current
economic conditions, most companies cannot afford providing
such courses as in-house training, but they see them as a must
to a (very) high extent, or at least as an asset – but those
answers came from employers that make use of another
language of international circulation, such as German or
French, as the official language of the workplace.
What is more, if we search all the results obtained to Q5 –
skills frequently used at work, the returns from the three sets of
questionnaires did not produce any one answer of 1. Never
used at work for any of the skills included in the list, which can
be conducive to strengthening the opinion that the initial choice
of soft skills included in the STCE course was appropriate.
Certainly, the qualitative data collected from all three
categories of respondents add other proposals of topics to be
included in the STCE course – as these are prompted by their
current job requirements, but no respondent actually considered
the list of skills proposed in the course, which is given in Table
1 and was fully included, with seven main entries under Q5 in
all three questionnaires, as irrelevant or useless.
At this stage in checking the STCE course impact, a range of
concluding remarks should be made. Firstly, as confirmed by
the results of the research carried out and presented in this
study, the STCE course was evaluated as a useful one for the
Master’s level. Its relevance for the engineering education
graduates has been confirmed, and the components included
are of interest for them at job.
Consequently, we advocate that such a course should be
included in the Master’s programs of engineering higher
education, with, if necessary, certain amendments of the
structure and choice of units, as suggested by needs analyses,
which play an important part in establishing the course outline
from case to case.
We also plea for a necessary curricular change with good
perspectives for the technical universities in this respect, with a
higher weighting given to soft skills development in general,
thus granting a well deserved and fully demonstrated better
visibility to this type of instruction (inter)nationally.
Moreover, taking into account our own experience in designing
and applying the STCE course, we maintain that foreign
language teachers can embark upon working out CLIL type
courses of soft skills blended with the language component,
thus contributing to the upholding of their technical universities
image and their attractiveness as study destinations for further
candidates.
4. REFERENCES
1.
2.
3.
4.
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BMW, The Effective Engineer – The Soft Skills - Keynote
presentation, 5th Annual International Colloquium
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Catelly, Y. M., Scientific and Technical Communication in
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Mechanical Engineering, International Conference on
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icee2007.dei.uc.pt/proceedings/authors/Z.html, (2007).
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