Teaching Soft Skills to ECE Students

Abstract

This paper summarizes techniques, methodologies, and processes used to teach soft skills to electrical and computer engineering students at Lafayette College. A quarter of the curriculum is devoted to broad education, and a substantial portion of the engineering courses including senior design devote adequate time to teaching, assessing, and improving non-technical skills of our graduates. The common term for these skills is "soft skills" and they include cross-cultural, legal awareness, language, entrepreneurship, ethical, political, management, economic, and interpersonal skills. While we have an ad-hoc approach to teaching some skills, we do have a systematic well established and continually assessed approach to teaching others. We have developed courses, lectures, and small programs to support learning and enhancing these skills. Some of the failed attempts are briefly discussed, but the focus is on what works, and how to improve it.