Developing and improving competence profiles of project teams in engineering education

This concept paper reflects an ongoing research on designing students’ team projects in engineering education with a focus on soft skills development. The core idea is to relate project tasks with relevant team situations and team roles which require and train certain sets of soft skills. The paper proposes: a) a model for developing the relevant soft skills out of project tasks, and b) an approach to relate individual competence profiles of team members with an overall team competence profile. A core assumption is that if a team is formed, individual competences are aggregated in a certain way to form a single team competence profile. However, in the case of soft skills this aggregating is more complex than simply adding skill levels, e.g., soft skills in teams are a result of specific combinations of competences. Understanding these effects is relevant for project management and engineering education. The paper proposes a first draft of a systematic framework for investigating such effects and for making them usable for the design of student projects in engineering education. It also provides insight into an example of an agile cross-border project conducted fully online and using the scrum method. The paper is considered to be a contribution to the development of project-based learning.