Literature Review of Engineering Student Perceptions of Professional Skills

Research Paper Recommended citation: Buten, E., & Johnson, A. W. (2025). Literature Review of Engineering Student Perceptions of Professional Skills. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631457. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. LITERATURE REVIEW OF ENGINEERING STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF PROFESSIONAL SKILLS 1.1 E. Buten a, 1 , A. W. Johnson b a University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States of America, ORCID 00090006-0742-7324 b University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States of America, ORCID 00000001-6989-2340 Conference Key Areas: Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills Keywords: Literature Review, professional skills, engineering students ABSTRACT The development of professional skills is critical in engineering education because these skills are integral to graduates’ transition into and success in the workforce. Despite educational efforts through classroom interventions and extracurricular activities, there is still a discrepancy between educational outcomes and industry needs. This scoping literature review examines the current literature of engineering student perceptions of professional skills in order to understand which students’ voices are reflected in literature and how their perceptions have been collected and analyzed. The review highlights that most studies focused on undergraduate engineering students’ perceptions by predominately using quantitative methods, such as close-ended survey questions, to assess their beliefs. The research is also dominated by undergraduate engineering students in Asia, Europe, and North America with insufficient inclusion of diverse demographics, which may lead to bias and lack of generalizability. This review emphasizes the importance of exploring diverse student experiences in order to assist students’ development of professional skills that align with industry expectations. 1 Corresponding Author E. Buten [email protected]du 2 INTRODUCTION Professional skill and competency development have become increasingly important within engineering education. The engineering industry repeatedly says graduates need interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies to operate in the engineering workforce. Engineering job advertisements often include non-technical competencies (Chaibate et al., 2019; Gao & Eldin, 2014), and professional skills are an important factor considered when hiring engineers(Eggleston et al., 2022; Hirudayaraj et al., 2021). The current workforce also requires engineers to perform more than purely technical tasks because engineers spend most of their time doing socio-technical work rather than purely technical tasks (Trevelyan, 2014). Therefore, if students are going to succeed in the workforce, they will need to acquire more than just technical competencies during their tertiary education. In response to industry concerns, academia has created interventions designed to develop professional skills in classroom settings and acknowledged the professional development present in extracurricular activities. While traditional engineering curricula focus on technical knowledge, classroom innovations such as problembased learning have been connected to the development of student professional skills (Markman et al., 2023). A literature review performed by Boelt et al. (2022) documented that researchers have assessed 14 different professional skills in connection with problem-based learning such as teamwork, communication, and problem-solving. Research has also highlighted how a wide range of extracurricular activities can have a positive effect on engineering students’ professional skill development (Sankaran & Mohanty, 2018; Young et al., 2014). Students believe they develop professional skills while participating in service-learning activities (Carberry et al., 2013), affinity-based engineering organizations (Ro & Knight, 2016), competitive engineering project teams (Wolfinbarger et al., 2021), and internships (Bae et al., 2022; Luk & Chan, 2022; Ozis et al., 2021). Students also learned about the importance of professional skills while participating in extracurricular activities (Polmear et al., 2020). Despite this, industry claims a majority of engineering students do not have the skills necessary for the workforce (Blom & Saeki, 2011) and there is a gap between what competencies industry professionals and students perceive as important (Naiem et al., 2015). Engineering alumni have also expressed that they felt their professional skills were generally underdeveloped (Fletcher & Harrington, 2018). One potential hypothesis is that engineering students lack the motivation to learn and refine their skills. Multiple motivational frameworks contain psychological factors that can influence student performance. Experiential Value Theory (Eccles, 2005) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) identify that students’ outcomes are influenced by psychological factors such as expectations for success, how much control they believe they have over their circumstances, and the usefulness of the outcomes. In terms of professional development, students’ perceptions of these skills should then influence the extent to which they develop them. Previous literature proves this connection exists for professional skills (Rizwan et al., 2018). Following this logic, researching students’ beliefs about professional skills is necessary to understand their motivations for developing, or not developing, professional skills during their college education. This scoping literature review provides a look at the current landscape of research literature. Previous literature reviews have reported student perceptions of professional skills development in classroom interventions (Boelt et al., 2022) and explored the kinds of perceptions studied in research (Murthy & Machet, 2021). This review, however, aims to investigate how researchers have collected students’ perceptions of professional skills and what types of students are represented in existing literature. Identifying which student populations have been included in previous literature is crucial, as it helps to address the potential underrepresentation of certain groups whose perspectives may have been marginalized, thereby highlighting biases in existing research. This process is also vital for assessing the generalizability of previously published results. Additionally, examining how these perspectives have been collected and analyzed can reveal gaps in the literature. Therefore, this review was guided by the following research questions: 1. Which students’ perspectives are represented in research literature about professional skills? 2. How have researchers collected and analyzed students’ perceptions of professional skills? 3 METHODOLOGY Despite the importance of these skills in engineering practice, there's not an agreedupon name for them. Research literature utilizes terms such as transferable skills, “soft” skills, graduate attributes, 21st-century skills, employability skills, and generic competencies to refer to these competencies that enable individuals to complete engineering work. Throughout this paper, I will use the term professional skills to refer to these competencies because it highlights their importance in engineering industry. 3.1 Search Protocol This paper followed a systematic process to identify and review research papers. Five databases were searched for engineering education articles: Scopus, ProQuest, Web of Science, Engineering Village, and Education Abstracts. These databases included access to engineering education specific journals and conferences including the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE), the European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE), and the European Society of Engineering Education (SEFI) Conference, as well as access to general engineering and educational publication sources. The same search terms were used with each database to search for papers systematically. Before this review, several scoping literature reviews were performed to determine what search terms would yield a collection of broad and relevant literature. Initial searches revealed that the competencies we are interested in researching are referred to in numerous ways including ‘generic competencies,’ ‘professional skills,’ ‘employability skills,’ ‘transferable skills,’ ‘soft skills,’ ‘21st-century skills,’ and ‘graduate attributes.’ Since the terms used can be regional preferences, we included all options as search terms to collect papers from a wider variety of countries and continents. Also, most papers used terminology such as ‘perspective’ or ‘perception’ when looking at students’ beliefs about professional skills. Other terms like ‘value,’ ‘importance,’ and ‘belief’ were investigated in the initial search phase but resulted in either a large number of studies that were not relevant or provided no results. The final search terms are detailed in Table 1. Table 1. Search Terms Search Terms Population “engineer* student*” Data Type perception* OR perspective* Topic “professional skill*” OR “soft skill*” OR “generic skill*” OR “transferable skill*” OR “employability skill*” OR “21st century skill*” OR “graduate attribute*” OR competenc* For this review, the same search terms were used in each database in January of 2024. Then, initial results were limited to only peer-reviewed articles published from 2003 to 2023 written in English. The initial search resulted in 407 articles from Scopus, 470 from ProQuest, 327 from Web of Science, 386 from Engineering Village, and 34 from Education Abstracts. After eliminating the duplicates, 813 unique papers were identified and exported to Zotero for analysis. 3.2 Selection Process First, the abstract and title screening phase was conducted followed by full-text screening of the selected papers. Initially, the first author read through each abstract and eliminated any article that violated the exclusion criteria. The first criterion is that the papers must be empirical research studies. This excluded papers about survey instrument development or literature reviews. The second criteria is that the studies must report on (a) engineering students’ (b) perspectives of (c) professional skills. These criteria excluded papers about instructor or industry perceptions of professional skills, students’ measured or observed abilities to perform the skills, and student perceptions about their career development in general. Twenty years was determined as a reasonable amount of time to study student perceptions of professional skills because there was an increase in interest in professional skills at the beginning of the 21st century as highlighted by The Engineer of 2020 report (National Academy of Engineering, 2004). It is also a common timeframe for literature reviews in the engineering education field (e.g. Chen et al., 2021; Van Den Broeck et al., 2024). During the initial scoping search, we learned that the search terms frequently matched papers that reported students’ perceptions of interventions that were designed to help develop professional skills, rather than their perceptions of the professional skills themselves. In response, we added a third exclusion criterion that papers must report observational research studies rather than intervention-specific studies. Lastly, there was a fourth English-only text exclusion criterion because we can only read English. After applying the criteria, 138 articles moved onto the full-text screening phase. During the full-text screening, the first author read through each article and applied the same criterion. In this round, a paper had to satisfy all criteria to be included. Most of the rejected papers did not report on professional skills. For example, some papers included terms like ‘professional skills’ or ‘generic competencies’ to motivate their papers but did not study the skills themselves. Other articles only reported on instructors’ or professional engineers’ perceptions of professional skills. Overall, 64 papers satisfied all inclusion criteria and were included in this literature review and are marked in the references list with asterisks. The appropriate articles were exported to a literature matrix to record the paper’s information, the research methods used, and the subject descriptions. 3.3 Limitations There are limitations to the study that come from methodological decisions. To start, the databases that were selected could potentially leave out papers that would fit the inclusion criteria. However, the selected databases were recommended by the university librarian specifically for engineering education research papers and contain numerous relevant journals and conferences for engineering education research. Secondly, professional skills research is difficult to collect because there is not one accepted term to use across regions and literature. While we tried to be inclusive by using a large number of different search terms, the search terms may have also unintentionally filtered out relevant papers. During the preliminary scoping phase, the first author searched for similar or related terms for ‘professional skills’ to create the final search term list. However, since beginning the review process we have also learned new terms such as ‘durable’ and ‘transversal’ skills that have also been used in research literature. 4 RESULTS 4.1 Types of Students As shown in Table 2, perspectives from all levels of higher education were represented in the literature. However, studies primarily focused on the perceptions of undergraduate engineering students, with fewer focusing on engineering master’s degree and Ph.D. students. Within the undergraduate student population, the majority of studies focused on upper-level students, or those who were past their first year of undergraduate study. The studies also collected perceptions from students studying a variety of engineering disciplines. It was more common to collect perceptions from multiple disciplines rather than focus on a specific discipline. 27 (42%) papers did not specify which engineering discipline the students were enrolled in. The remaining papers included perceptions from students studying foundational engineering disciplines: mechanical (18 papers), electrical (17 papers), civil (15 papers), chemical (12), computer (10 papers), and industrial (8 papers) engineering. The global regions reported in Table 2 refer to where the students’ institution is located, not the nationality of participants. A few papers described the nationalities of the participants as international or domestic but rarely described the countries that the international students were from. Also, all regions listed in Table 2 include papers from at least 2 countries. The Asia and Europe categories include the largest variety of countries. 7 Asian countries were represented and 14 European countries were included. In contrast, all but one North American study was from the United States while the African, Middle Eastern, and South American categories only contain 2 studies from 2 different countries. A few papers collected perceptions from multiple countries (Kövesi & Kálmán, 2020; Šuligoj et al., 2020; Ward & Thiriet, 2010) and across continents (Edwards-Schachter et al., 2015; Haase et al., 2013; Walther et al., 2008). Table 2. Students Reported in Literature Paper Information Number of papers (%) Year of Students Undergraduate 49 77% All 7 11% First-year 8 13% Upperclassmen 24 38% Unspecified 10 16% Graduate 12 19% Masters 11 17% Doctorate 2 3% Unspecified 1 2% Not specified 7 11% Regions Africa 2 3% Australia 5 8% Asia 16 25% Europe 23 36% Middle East 2 3% North America 19 30% South America 2 3% 4.2 Research Methods Researchers primarily used quantitative survey methods to collect students’ perceptions of professional skills. While some authors used multiple methods to investigate different sources of data within the same paper, Table 3 only represents the methods that pertained to student perceptions. For example, Groeneveld et al. used focus groups to collect perceptions from industry and interviewed students to collect their perceptions (2023). As displayed below, 81% of papers collected quantitative data about students’ perceptions by using close-ended questions in surveys, most commonly Likert-scale questions. Only one study utilized institutional quantitative data in addition to a survey instrument to investigate student perceptions. Meanwhile, 36% of papers collected qualitative data. The most common method was open-ended survey questions followed by interviews and focus groups conducted with students. A few studies collected both qualitative and quantitative data. Papers that used multiple methods are double counted in both the quantitative and qualitative rows in Table 3. 12 surveys collected qualitative and quantitative responses and 2 studies conducted interviews in addition to collecting quantitative survey responses from students. For quantitative studies, descriptive statistics were shared by almost all researchers that collected quantitative data; meanwhile, 33 of the 52 studies used some form of inferential statistics, such as a t-test or regression analysis, to identify significant differences or causal relationships. For the qualitative analysis, the majority of researchers used inductive coding techniques such as thematic or content analysis to identify patterns. Only 3 studies used deductive coding techniques and 1 simply counted the number of times specific words appeared. Table 3. Research Methods Paper information Number of papers (%) Data Collection Qualitative 23 36% Focus Groups 2 3% Interviews 10 16% Surveys 13 20% Written Assignments 2 3% Quantitative 53 83% Surveys 52 81% Institutional Data 1 2% Data Analysis Qualitative 23 36% Counts 1 2% Deductive Coding 3 5% Inductive Coding 21 33% Quantitative 52 81% Descriptive Statistics 50 78% Inferential Statistics 33 52% 5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Researchers have primarily used quantitative methods to collect student perceptions. Within the quantitative studies, a range of validity measures for the survey instruments were used to collect student perceptions. Several papers calculated quality metrics such as confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and Cronbach’s alpha. Others used previously validated instruments such as the Generic Competencies Perceptions Questionnaire (Chan & Fong, 2018; Pinto et al., 2023). However, many studies that used surveys did not describe any validation metrics and almost no papers reported on an underlying framework for their survey instrument. While a few frameworks were mentioned, frameworks were overwhelmingly used in the qualitative papers. Frameworks, such as the Theory of Planned Behavior and Expectancy Value Theory, describe multiple psychological and sociological factors that create the basis for students’ perceptions and motivations that have not previously been captured in previous studies. By incorporating different methodologies and frameworks, more aspects of students’ beliefs and perceptions can be captured by researchers. Quantitative data is better equipped to answer “what” or “which” questions rather than “how” or “why” questions (Creswell, 2009). Therefore, previous literature focuses on what students believe and which skills students rank higher than others. This corresponds with the findings from another literature review where Murthy & Machel identified two main student perceptions that exist in the literature: what skills students believe are important and students’ perceived skill level for professional skills (Murthy & Machet, 2021). While establishing which skills students believe are valuable and to what extent they can perform them is important, it does not paint a full picture of student beliefs. Student identities mentioned in the papers include gender, nationality, race, and ethnicity. However, not enough papers included those specific identities to identify what groups of students, if any, have been overor underrepresented in the literature. This can lead to a lack of generalizability and misinterpretations of the data. Studies have shown differences in student perceptions of professional skills across gender (Cruz-Sandoval et al., 2023; Pinto et al., 2023; Pogatsnik, 2019; Yap & Tan, 2022), international experience (Guillen-Yparrea et al., 2023), and the type of university that they attended (Lee & Chin, 2017; Rizwan et al., 2018). Without including the participants' identities, what may appear as an understanding of student perceptions may reflect the opinions of a sub-section of engineering students. Overall, there is evidence of engineering students’ perceptions of professional skills from around the world. However, research literature predominately reflects perceptions of undergraduate engineering students attending institutions in Asia, Europe, and North America. As we continue to research engineering students’ development and perceptions of professional skills it’s important to identify if there are groups of students whose ideas and beliefs are not reflected in literature especially when designing programs or interventions to address students’ opinions and/or development in various settings. Also, researchers have predominantly used quantitative methods to understand student perceptions. By not using qualitative methods to assess student perceptions, nuances may be overlooked and aspects of student beliefs may be under-researched. 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We’d like to thank Dr. Pamela Moss for her guidance and expert support to effectively plan, organize, and execute this literature review and Jamie Niehof who helped identify and navigate databases. *Idrus, H. (2017). 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