Abstract
This article presents a 10-year experience of soft and transferable skills acquisition through the involvement of PhD students in the organization of an international conference. Soft and transferable skills acquisition is currently perceived as a core component of doctoral studies. Examples include writing and communication, teamwork, time management, leadership, resource management, negotiation, problem solving, listening, planning, entrepreneurial spirit, mastering ethics awareness, etc. The need for such skills is due to the leading role that doctoral students are expected to play in society. As such, various organizations have issued recommendations for doctoral programs to include a formal component of soft skills training. In this article, an effective way of introducing soft and transferable skills acquisition in doctoral engineering education is introduced. Namely, a form of collaborative project-based learning is designed as a compulsory course. This includes a set of base lectures, a long period of parallel working groups focusing on the various aspects of organizing an international conference, running the actual conference, and performing a post-conference assessment. Results and lessons learned demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Highlights
The structure and content of doctoral programs in engineering have faced a considerable evolution in the last decade [1,2,3]
Of relevance is the recognition of the importance of soft and transferable skills in doctoral education [2] such as interpersonal relationship capabilities and skills that can be transferred between jobs and functions
PhD students tend to be so focused on acquiring specific technical skills in their field that they neglect the importance of acquiring these other skills that are crucial in a competitive job market
Summary
School” type type in in the the conference conference program program proved proved successful for complementing students’. Some show some surprise priori in aseeing topicssuch in a technical sessions are typically students show someasurprise priorisuch in seeing topics in conference, a technical those conference, those sessions well attended, andattended, the feedback a posteriori, questionnaires, is very positive. This can be are typically well and the feedback athrough posteriori, through questionnaires, is very positive. The invited speaker exposed the topic in a different way, way, avoiding the presentation the classic codes of conduct, opting a presentation based avoiding the presentation of theofclassic codes of conduct, and and opting for aforpresentation based on on images and selected parts of books. It was a very interesting presentation with a completely different view on technology and science, from the perspective of a journalist and the means to communicate our PhDs work and research.” (student from the 2016 edition)
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