Name: Future Proofing Engineers Webinar Recording
Uploaded: 2026-05-29T17:42:10.610Z
Duration: 59 min 19 s
Description: Future Proofing Engineers Webinar Recording

Transcript for "Future Proofing Engineers Webinar Recording": Welcome, everyone. I just wanted to make sure that, you know, you, firstly, thank you for attending this webinar. It is, as you can see, called, Future Proofing Engineers, the Durable Skills You Can't Automate. My name is Anju Viswan Singh, and I'm joining today from Acuity Insights. We are a corporate member with the ASEE. And since 2022, we've actually had the opportunity to participate in a number of thought leadership activities with the ASCE through events like today's webinar. Attending and also presenting at a number of conferences and and much, much more. Our solutions which focus on assessing personal and professional skills of applicants and learners, aligns very closely with today's topic, which examine the essential role of of, professional skills for future engineers, also known as durable skills or soft skills. You know, there are so many different human skills, many different terms for it, especially in the age of AI. Our panelists will be taking questions from the audiences, at the end of the webinar. But in the meantime, please do enter your questions in the q and a box throughout the webinar, and we will get to them after the panelists have presented. So, moving on, before we begin, I just wanted to provide you with a bit of an overview of Acuity Insights. We are in the, realm of admissions, program management, as well as analytics and insights tools. Our two main assessments in the professional skills, realm are, open response situational judgment tests, also known as SJTs, that measure social intelligence and professionalism to help you evaluate your applicants holistically at the time of admissions and support the development of students' professional skills in program. Unlike other tools that focus on academic metrics, which are really important as well, knowledge of expected behaviors or subjective metrics like, you know, personal statements and reference letters, our assessments actually allow applicants and learners to really draw upon their unique experiences, and express the underlying reasoning behind the responses to scenarios and questions. Our in program professional skills development tool is a is a new offering from us. It's modular. It can be used within the program for students. It's, a story based assessment, where learners actually respond to real world scenarios. The assessment measures their non academic skills, and then we provide feedback on the resources that helps them grow. In addition to the learners getting their feedback, we also have, you know, programs getting a full view of how, you know, the entire student cohort did so that they can make their own plans as well into how different students can be supported in the development of these professional skills. To date, over 1,000,000 applicants have taken Casper from across 500 different higher education programs from medicine, health sciences, business, education, all the way to engineering. So, with that, you know, one other thing that, I wanted to, provide you with some information on, is this report that we have done. It is called Future Proofing Students' Professional Skills in the Age of AI. Drawing upon academic and market research, this report highlights how universities can better equip students with the professional skills, also known, like I said, as durable skills, human skills, such as empathy, resilience, ethical reasoning that machines actually can't replicate and and these skills are becoming more and more and more, important as, you know, AI, continues to sort of move into so many different realms of our lives. Some key insights from the report are, you know, that 75% of long term job success, is tied to professional skills, you know. So technical expertise is state is table stakes, but so much of the success actually depends also on professional skills. And over 25% of executives say that they actually will not hire a recent grad, due to the lack of durable skills. This really highlights how important it is to develop these skills, and have your graduates ready with these skills, as they as they go into their professional lives. So we will be sending you a full the full copy of this report at the end of this webinar, along with the recording of the webinar as well. So with that, with all of that out of the way, I'm really thrilled to be introducing our presenters today who are going to lead the discussion on why professional durable skills have become nonnegotiable in in for success in engineering and also strategies for cultivating these skills in your students. So first and foremost, doctor Denise r Simmons, is the associate dean for workforce development in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, and professor of civil engineering in the engineering school of sustainable infrastructure and environment at the University of Florida. Doctor Simmons passionately pursues workforce research that bridges the space between, understanding the future of work in civil engineering in The United States and characterizing, measuring, and evaluating the competencies, learning technologies, and ecosystems that equip and sustain an inclusive workforce for that future. She's concerned first about the human condition and driven and inspired by what an organization can achieve by attending, to the needs of its people. Next is PJ Boardman. And, you know, they are the global director of STEM outreach and workforce development at MathWorks, managing a team responsible for catalyzing, engaging, and inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers to bridge the STEM gap and prepare the workforce of tomorrow. PJ's team identifies, initiates, and supports scalable programs to connect students and educators with training content and technology to advance their STEM initiatives. Since, she sorry. She is also the past chair of the ASCE corporate member council, which is the CMC, and the liaison for ASCE p twelve commission, as well as a member of the executive committee for the global engineering team's council. Prior to joining MathWorks, PJ was a vice president at Cengage Learning and Pearson Education. Doctor Alan Chevelle, is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at Bucknell University. He studied auto electronics and ultrafast optics at Rice University, followed by fourteen years as a faculty member at Oklahoma State University, working to, sorry, working on terahertz frequencies and engineering education. While at Oklahoma State, he developed courses in photonics and engineering design. After serving for two and a half years as a program director in engineering education at the National Science Foundation, he took his current position in electrical and computer engineering at Butler University. He is currently interested in engineering design education, engineering education policy, and the philosophy of engineering education. So these are our fabulous panelists for today. And, Denise, I'm gonna pass it over to you to begin the discussion by helping us to establish what we mean when we talk about durable or professional skills, and how these skills impact the profession. Thank you, Anju, for that introduction. We're joining this webinar today as Amazon announced it's cutting 14,000 corporate jobs or about 4% to reduce bureaucracy, streamline layers, and relocate resources to top customer focused, vets like AI, so I think it's really a great time for us to dive in and really understand this particular topic. Practicing engineers don't deliver calculus, not physics or any of the subjects studied in college. They deliver consequences and tools to accelerate the skills that persist their durable skills, decide whether those consequences enhance safety, equity, and trust. Today, it makes I'll make the case that durable skills, particularly, are nonnegotiable, show that critical thinking and breaking down and sharing fast practical strategies that you can adopt immediately is a part of what I hope to have as my conversation. Before we talk about, development, I want to first level set on the professional measure outcomes. ABEC criterion three, the student outcomes that, measure the capabilities graduates must demonstrate at completion, also document how those outcomes, are assessed and improved. These outcomes span both sides of this slide. Technical skills, which are things like analysis, experimentation, design under constraints, and professional skills, communication, teamwork, ethics, and judgment. These two together are very, very important. I'll call your attention to the professional skills side. I wanna see if we can translate our language now and begin to think about these as durable skills because they persist as tools and context as context change, and they govern how technical work becomes safe, timely, trusted outcomes. An engineer with excellent problem solving and judgment skills will succeed if they communicate clearly, collaborate effectively, and approach problems with an ethical mindset. With AI's accelerated analysis, the integration of technical and durable professional skills matter even more. Technical is necessary, durable and professional skills are decisive, especially for judgment and public trust. ABET sets the base baseline for readiness. The question is though, how we power that readiness. A helpful lens to see readiness as powered by two engines. First, as we said, the technical side, which is the functional knowledge and tool fluency, things like Python and and AutoCAD math MathLab domain methods remain extremely important. These change quickly and demand continues and and demand continues upscaling to keep up with this. They are essential but by themselves are increasingly, commoditized, especially as AI spreads, speeds production. The second engine is what I'll call durable skills, the mindset and core behaviors that persist as tools change, things like communication, leadership, collaboration, creativity, agility, professionalism. These skills govern judgment, how problems are framed, how trade offs are made, how teams coordinate, how ethical responsibilities are honored. With AI in the loop, this is where critical thinking risk concentrates. What we ask tools to do, what we accept from them, and when we challenge or accelerate is important and rests in this domain of durable skills. In short, technical skill gets you to the table. Durable professional skills, though, carry the work across the finish line safely, ethically, and with public trust. Let's make this concrete. Communication, when communication is strong, design intent becomes shared action. RFIs drop and commune and communities understand what to expect. When it's thin though, we buy rework, delays, and public pushback. Teamwork and collaboration with empathy gets us to cross discipline reviews or or practical benefits include cross discipline reviews. And they surface, constructability and safety, hazards early. Without them, surprises show up. In the field, safety drifts and blame takes root. I'll move on to resilience. Disruption happens certainly due to weather, supply, scope, a number of different things, but resilience enables fast, safe replans. Without it, teams burn out, schedules become brittle, and quality declines. Across all five of these example skills, the pattern is the same. These durable professional skills convert fast technical output into safe, timely, trusted outcomes. So by critical thinking, as one example, I mean warranted judgment, surfacing assumptions, linking claims to evidence, weighing trade offs, and anticipating second order effects. With artificial intelligence, this is this is exactly where the risk is. The tools can produce confident, plausible text, code, and calculations that mask gaps. Under deadline pressure, it's easy to accept this first kind of draft, inherit unvetted assumptions, and miss who bears the risk. This is the risk of critical thinking and relying only on outputs from AI. What happens in practice? Decision logs, or what what what what happens in practice? Decision logs, which are sort of these one page problem framing, kinds of documents, Alternative decisions can be considered and rejected, at least examined. Key assumptions and uncertainties can be enumerated and looked at. Risks and stakeholder impacts can be examined. There can be things like argument evidence maps, that can use bring back critical thinking. They can make the chain of decisions pretty much clear or much clearer, explicit, unlike outputs from AI where we may not know where that happens. We can connect with argument evidence mapping, a claim to an evidence to an assumption to residual risk. I'll jump to one other example of what helps and that is AI transparency rule. So if a tool was used, students or employees, if you're in the workplace, can show the prompt, the rationale, the checks they performed, and what they changed before accepting an output. The idea here is how do we take this critical risk to thinking, but make it a little bit more transparent so we can truly work collaboratively with AI? These moves make thinking visible, coachable, and assessable in our classes and in an industry setting. We don't ban tools, I I believe. We professionalize their use. This sets up my next slide where I'll show exactly a few examples of how we can teach and assess this now. From risk to quick wins, things that you might can employ, I say this week, maybe today. This idea of this, add a one page decision audit to major assignments, and, of course, I'm speaking in course language. It can be added, to change in a corporate environment. Students can submit the design and thinking, framing alternatives, assumptions, risks, the stakeholder impacts they're considering, and more. It's it's it's like to grading with a five minute rubric and aligns with ABET's assessment continuous improvement, expectations. Another example is this idea of running a ninety minute ethics and and, ethics sprint in action. Present messy, incomplete data. Ask teams to surface uncertainties, affected parties, risks, and mitigations. You hear the language of judgment emerge, and then it can be discussed. The last example here I have is AI transparency rule. If a tool is used, students can include the prompt, the checks, and what changed because of the human review, not just simply relying on the output from AI. AI becomes a metacognitive mirror, not an answer vending machine. If you if you have a bit more room, you can rotate other examples, things like design huddles and five minute micro rubric courses and building, reasoning portfolios that are kinda low friction and show evidence of growth. Finally, I'll just kinda give just a quick wrap up here. So why durable skills are nonnegotiable? Well, I opened by saying that well, let me zoom out and connect these to outcomes. Engineering programs still see meaningful, attribution to both technical and nontechnical skills. Here, we're calling professional or durable. I opened by saying engineers deliver consequence. Durable professional skills decide whether those consequences advance safety, equity, and trust. With AI in the loop, critical thinking is where the risk is. These three moves can start shifting this this risk. Thank you. Thank you so much, Denise. You know, this was great content in terms of understanding exactly, you know, where, we how we should be thinking about durable skills. And now that we have established what we mean by durable skills in engineering, let's look at how we can begin to build stronger bridges between academia and industry to identify these skills in our learners and support their development. I will pass it over to PJ now. Hello, everyone. I'm PJ Boardman, and I'm the director of STEM outreach and workforce development at MathWorks. I'm from our home office in the Boston area, and I'm also here representing industry as the past chair of the corporate member council of ASEE. Just a little bit of context about my organization, MathWorks. We work with over 7,000 schools across the world that use our software, MATLAB and Simulink, for teaching, learning, and research. And we reach about 7,000,000 students, educators, and researchers each year. In addition, we work with over a 100,000 industry partners. And as a result, we get to see both some of the challenges and opportunities as we think about preparing students with the skills needed for the jobs of the future. So, the topic today is of keen interest to me and to our organization, as we think about the technical skills and professional skills. And so so as we look at the technical skills, some of the areas where, we see growth opportunities as we think about future jobs, and some of these definitely came up in the survey results, were areas like AI and Gen AI. And we think it's really important for engineering students to have AI literacy to understand the power of it, the challenges of it, and the opportunities as they consider educate engineering workflows. Modeling and simulation and certainly systems engineering. And this is increasingly important as we think about the complex engineered systems that students will work on when they graduate. And they need to be able to tackle these working with cross functional teams, be able to communicate with, you know, people of different domain expertise. And that gets to some of the professional durable skills we'll talk about in just a moment. As we think about domain expertise in areas of growth opportunities, here are some areas that we see, ones like unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, robotics and autonomous systems, electric vehicles, EVs or renewables as we think about climate change. And the bottom line is students are expected to have a strong engineering foundation as they go off to industry. And it's table stakes. Industry can and will upskill students in many cases. I can tell you at MathWorks, a good part of your first year here, you'll be spent, you know, training to be sure that you have the skills for your particular role sharpened. And we also expect a minimum amount of ongoing training each year. And so that's important. And so so but these are sort of table stakes to get a job, to secure a job. As we think about professional skills, durable skills, these have always been important, and I'm happy to see the spotlight, on these skills in this survey. Some that we think are particularly important are having a growth mindset, being coachable, being able to communicate and tell a story, to collaborate and to build relationships. And especially as we think about AI and Gen AI, having critical thinking and judgment, being able to discern if an output makes sense and being able to, really use domain expertise as an engineer to challenge outputs to come to the best solution, And innovation and data driven decision making. It is as we talked about, you know, to get a job, to secure a job, you definitely need these technical skills. But to be successful in a role, to stay in a culture, to be promoted, to be a leader, it's really challenging to succeed, if not impossible, without these professional durable skills. So how can industry help? I'm gonna give you some examples of ways that industry can collaborate to bridge theory and practice. The first is preparing students with industry tools. I'm gonna give you an example. We've recently launched MATLAB Copilot at MathWorks, and this is designed to create, refine, debug MATLAB code. And students need to learn faculty can can use this teachers for for for teaching, students for learning, as, an assistant or a coach to to get reinforcement and to understand a concept, for example, for students. But most definitely, like any tool in an engineer's toolkit, you need to challenge the output and use domain expertise to come to the best solution. Other ways industry can partner with academia is project based learning. Some ways, we could do this is through modular courseware. So here's some example of modular courseware we've created in areas like AI or neural networks. Online training. We provide on ramps, which are free trainings in emerging areas as well as, many hours of trainings with our online training suite. In addition, capstone projects, we call them challenge projects where, students can be challenged, to on some of the areas that are leading to technology trends like robotics and AI, autonomous systems. And here they can answer a a problem, work on a project and get feedback from an engineer, and at the end get a certificate that they can put on their resume. And continued projects as we look about co curricular activities, you know, student competitions have proven to sharpen both those technical and leadership skills over time. And we sponsor approximately a 100, student competitions and hack a thons each year. And think of these as a great way to sharpen both those technical and leadership skills. And finally, on the job experience. Certainly, as many internships and a co ops as a student can have to get that real on the job experience and get to know different company cultures. We also have something called MATLAB, student ambassadors on campuses where students can train and coach other students. And finally, when students graduate, they can join a cohort of employees at MathWorks that are full time employees called our engineering development group. This group spends half of their time on technical support, half of their time working on projects that they choose to be able to sharpen their skills and really get to see what are different job opportunities they may have never heard of or experienced and be able to basically learn a little bit more about those roles as they refine their technical skills. Now I would be remiss, I'm the liaison with the p twelve commission, to not speak about the importance of starting earlier with both these technical and professional skills as we think about k 12 education. And, certainly, some of these themes apply whether it's, you know, preparing students with industry tools and capabilities at an age appropriate level. Also project based learning. I wanna mention two curriculum projects that were mentioned, that were brought up in the recent mindset report from ASEE and the National Academy. One is YESS, which means youth engineering solutions. This is a middle school curriculum that takes real engineering challenges and brings them to the classroom for engineering and computer science curriculum. It's a collaboration with the Boston Museum of Science and MathWorks. And, here we work with interactive examples with our software MATLAB. And scoot students can try machine learning, with data analysis to understand algorithms while they create an eco friendly slipper, or they can learn a little bit about simulation by creating a wearable alert system. And activities like this spark that excitement engagement in younger students and get them working in group projects even as early as, younger ages as middle school. A second curriculum is engineering for us all, which is a high school curriculum, designed to create our next generation of engineers, by exposing high school students to engineering design challenges. We're working on a new course with engineering plus programming with MATLAB with e four USA, and they do a wonderful job creating pathways for these students to continue on with, universities that they collaborate with. A continuation of student competitions. There are some wonderful competitions that work on both, you know, technical and, professional skills for younger students like First, Best, RoboCup, and VEX robotics, as well as the m three c challenge, which is a math modeling, challenge that MathWorks has along with CIAM. In addition, industry can help with faculty training to help upskill faculty to help support them with engineering training as well as providing guest speakers to help students see themselves in STEM and envision careers they may never have imagined. I think as you see here, a theme is project based learning, and students learning by doing is a great way to refine some of those technical skills, especially in these emerging areas we're referring to like AI. In addition, we're seeing, you know, certainly those professional skills working on group projects in a more deliberate way can help students stand out from the crowd to set them apart by having that provide, you know, combination, that powerful combination of technical and professional skills. I'm gonna leave you with two quotes, from real students that I love, that relate, directly to the topic today. One is from Jessica Britt from Georgia Tech who went on to work at Argonne National Labs in Accenture. And she speaks to the importance of hands on projects really refining her technical skills to tackle real world problems. And the second is Jack Bauer from Leonardo Helicopters who talks about that competitions were the closest thing to an actual work environment. And so I think this speaks to the importance of the topic that we're discussing today. And I look forward to your questions, and, here's my contact information. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much, PJ. This was this was such great information, and I'm sure you've given everyone a few ideas on, you know, what what to take to the industry partners when, when we talk to them. So thank you for that. And let's turn now to Alan who will walk us through some practical strategies for cultivating these key competencies in our current students. Over to you, Alan. Think you're on mute, so you may need to unmute yourself. K. There we go. There you go. Thank you. Perfect. So if you're here, you probably don't need to be sold on the importance of durable skills. But somebody at a very large engineering firm showed something to me once years ago that has always stuck in my mind, and that's this sort of, you know, Cartesian graph here. And according to this employer, if somebody has both technical skills and durable skills, you want to hire that person and you're going to retain them. If somebody doesn't have either of them, that's a pretty clear do not hire decision, and those are not the interesting quadrants. The interesting quadrants are what happens if they have technical skills but not the durable skills. If you hire them, they quit after several years because they don't have a chance to advance within the organization. If they have durable skills and not technical skills, they tend to quit because they don't have the respect of their colleagues. And this really shows to me that both sets of skills are important. You know, in my experience, when you talk to people hiring students, generally, the technical skills are assumed based on the type of program you have, what school you are, student GPAs, and a general trust in the educational system to basically do its job. But durable skills need to be developed and demonstrated. So when students are interviewing and in early days on the job, it's these durable skills that people are really looking for. And I want to put aside maybe one perception that durable skills are a list. They're topics that can be developed like knowledge areas. I don't see it that way. I think they're really very highly intersectional. They need to be developed together, not as a set of separate skills, which is what most of the slides will be about here. So I'm gonna go through the different sets of durable skills and perhaps some ways to help create them in your program. So first, communication. I think this is one of the the most important skills, and you wanna scaffold communication across the curriculum. You know, I often joke that they say to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and to every faculty member, a problem looks like a new course. This is not the way, that you want to teach communications by having a single communications course. It really needs to stretch across the curriculum. You wanna have the things students communicate on, the stakeholder driven deliverables, design reports, data sheets, proposals, posters. If they're gonna use it in the workforce, that's the type of thing you want to have them work on. You wanna provide rapid feedback and or peer review with chances for iterative improvement when you give, students abilities to communicate, have them write reports and things like that. You should encourage multimodal communication, not just, writing, but also oral, visual, data storytelling, and things like that. And it's really important to keep reiterating to students throughout the entire program just how important communication is to their eventual employability. In collaboration and teamwork, a couple good practices are that you generally deliberately form teams rather than let students self select, serving students, looking into backgrounds, finding overlapping times, using tools like CATME to help you do this can be very helpful. Also providing explicit instruction and teamwork skills. Carl Smith, who I think is on the call today, has a book out and has for several years that talk about these teamwork skills. Integrating regular peer evaluation instructor assessment, again, tools like CATME and there are some others that do that. It also helps to utilize the tools that support remote teamwork practices that more and more are being used in the workforce, things like GetSlack. And one of my favorites that I found recently and that is actually free in a limited way to educational institutions is a program a a platform called Miro. And you wanna address conflict management explicitly. Don't let that go. You have to discuss processes, how to facilitate contracts, decision dynamics with students in real time in order to teach collaboration and teamwork. Leadership is one of those things that I think is often overhyped, but is something that's necessary for everybody because today's organizations are much flatter than they are hierarchical like they were in the old days. So providing opportunities for all students to lead within project teams at some point in the curriculum is important. We implement weekly reflections on topics such as decision making conflicts, dynamics, ethical trade offs, which really make leadership explicit, providing mentorship and coaching by pairing students across class years, and if possible with industry mentors or alumni can help. Introducing formal leadership frameworks. We use servant leadership a lot. So students have examples to follow. And making the leadership explicit rather than implicit by integrating it into the learning objectives. Don't just assume student leadership is going to kind of emerge spontaneously. You wanna talk about it. You wanna make the need for leadership explicit in what you do. In terms of creativity and innovation, I can't stress enough how important it is to incorporate projects, particularly projects that have design thinking and iterative ideation prototype test cycles built into them. The more you can have them iterate, the more creative they're able to be. You want your projects, if possible, to address ill defined socio technical issues because this opens up a design space, that's big enough to really let students explore rather than narrow technical design. For example, in one of our classes, we have the students choose on the very first day as a class one of the United Nations sustainable development goals, and then they use the rest of the class to design something that addresses that goal. Supporting convergence, which is a lot of different disciplines contributing to a wicked problem, is really important. So bringing in, people from the arts, business, social sciences can help students break out of their disciplinary fixation because it's really important to realize that engineering students have their own view of what counts as engineering and what doesn't count as engineering. And oftentimes, the durable skills students discount is needed for engineering when that's absolutely not true. So bringing in other experts can really help there. You wanna scaffold creativity and ideation rather than expecting students to spontaneously be creative. One of the fun things I played around with this summer is creating an engineering design monster manual after Dungeons and Dragons, and the monsters in this are engineering design representations I have my students use throughout our four year design sequence. And so this is a fun way to, in a creative way, bring these ideas of ideation in. It's really important to assess novelty and practicality. I use rubrics a lot. I'm a big supporter in rubrics and using them in a way that are calibrated and that involve multiple people. And I found that the AAC value rubrics, which you can download for free online, are really helpful to think through creating rubrics. Again, as with all things, you don't wanna have a single capstone course where you expect students to be creative. You wanna have sustained exposure over the years, and you've gotta be creative yourself. You've gotta constantly iterate your course based on something that got caught off there, but based on your own experiences, based on on feedback from students. Agility and agency, I think, is really important. Incorporating agile or lean development into your courses, building on models like lean startups, and agile development processes where possible is very important as you design your courses. Increasing student agency in a controlled way over time. In our curriculum, we start with a lot of scaffolding in our design courses and very intentionally remove that scaffolding over the four years. Encouraging metacognitive reflection on a regular Basecamp, we use a platform called Basecamp, which is free to academic institutions to support that. Supporting uncertainty and learning through failure is also very important to help students build resilience. We have failure reports. So if a student's design project fails, they can earn all their points back by writing a failure report. Formative feedback checkpoints and scaffolding the transfer of these skills by referring to prior curricular experiences and explicitly developing heuristics to transfer the types of skills they're developing in these courses is also very important. Professionalism using situated learning. I'm pointing out an excellent book by James gee, Situated Language and Learning, which really helped me understand situated learning here. Exploring negative project outcomes, there was an online resource called the Tarot of Tech, that I found some years ago, and I recreated the Tarot of Tech cards for my own course and used this to have students think through negative project outcomes. Supporting reflective portfolios, we use e portfolios and maintaining over these maintaining these over multiple years is very valuable. Also, explicitly teaching, professionalism. James Trevelyan in Australia has several good books to talk about this that I would highly recommend. I think ethics is a culture. You have to weave it throughout the technical courses and model the behaviors. You can't just have a course on ethics. And bringing in speakers, providing feedback, for students on how to have difficult conversations, and then longitudinally reinforcing all of these behaviors across the year, as I've said over and over again, is quite important. So let me just wrap up here with caution you about what I'm calling outcomes based thinking. ABED in many ways encourage us to think about outcomes. And it's really the culture that matters in this particular case. What's the culture you build in the department? How is that communicated to students? How does that extend across all the courses in your curriculum, not just a single course focused on durable skills? So the cross cutting lessons I would have is longitudinal integration. Integrate these things across multiple years where possible. Use authentic situated and contextual learning. That's quite important. Getting students to engage in reflection and metacognition is the only way they're gonna develop these durable skills. This can be quite difficult for students to do because they don't see it as fitting into their personal epistemology of what counts in engineering. But, again, continued exposure can change this And emphasize feedback and transfer. You really wanna give students feedback on the behaviors, when they're doing durable skills well, what they need to correct. And talking about how these things transfer across contexts so they see how to use them in multiple, domains is also very important. And I think that's it for me. Thank you so much, Alan. This has been such a great sort of presentation. Thank you to all three presenters. So at this time, we will ask the presenters to answer some of your questions, that have been coming through the q and a box. Thank you so much for sending them through. So maybe let's get started. But before that, let me just talk about one of the comments that has come up quite a lot in the q and a box, which is I think one of the links is not working. So we will just make sure that in the follow-up, we will send you the direct link, the right the right link. So the first question here, thank you to everyone for coming on their cameras. Denise, the first one's for you. How do you assess critical thinking, and other twenty first century skills? Yeah. Thanks for that, question. I don't I I think about multiple ways to sort of uncover what's going on in someone's mind to to, have a a a discussion about why things are about judgments. And so some of the the logs or the audit logs in that, that I suggested on my slides were meant to to uncover what might be twirling in someone's head and have them maybe more commit that to paper where at least a discussion can then be had. So critical thinking, because it is something that really does go on almost automatically, our brains as as computers sort of go through this. I think anytime you can write reflective prompts down and then that invites a conversation is a way to at least understand how someone is thinking. I think in terms of how to teach that, is maybe a broader question because I think you have to think about how many kinds of things you're considering. A lot of times, we think there's an answer and there's exact there's a question, there's exactly one answer. I think if it's a mathematical problem, perhaps. If it's more complex, there's multiple things. So the judgment on the way to that is very, very important. And structuring courses where there are these open ended kinds of things, one way to help students build that critical thinking. I'll stop there. Oh, no. That was great. Thank you so much for sharing that, Denise. And I just wanted to say that I think right at the top of the webinar, we had also talked about a couple of assessments that we do at Acuity Insights. One is at the admission stage where you can assess a lot of these skills, and pair them with the academic metrics that you would normally be looking at and just, like, make a decision around that time. And even if you index more on the academic skills, you know, it just gives you a bit of a lens into, how they might be doing on durable skills so that you can support them through the journey once they are in the in in the program. The other one is the in program, in the professional development tool that we offer where you can also assess it and there are interventions that you can plan. So thank you so much for that. And, our next question is for PJ. Where might one one find more information about the different and exciting, I just missed it. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I just missed the question. The different and exciting skill building activities that you described. So, PJ, over to you. So first of all, thank you for that question. Many of the resources I mentioned are available on mathworks.com, our website. What I would like to do and propose to the organizers of this webinar is I can put together a curated list for all of the attendees, and we can send it after the fact so that you have the information that we discussed today and have access to it. I do wanna underscore if there's additional questions from folks on the line, we have a team of customer success engineers that work with university programs. So I can connect you after this call if you have additional questions to your appropriate customer success engineer. My particular team manages stem outreach initiatives like the yes and m p for USA's, etcetera too. So if there's additional questions, I'm happy to take those after the call today. So thank you. Thank you so much, PJ, for being available after the webinar as well. And I'm sure no one will object to you putting together a list of resources that they can access. So thank you so much for, for doing that, and we will make sure that we distribute those. Thank you. Thank you. So our next question is for Alan. And the here's how the question goes. Faculty often, lament the fact that there isn't enough time to deliver the technical curriculum. How do we convince faculty to find the time to integrate some of their ideas or some of the great ideas that that you shared into their classroom? Yeah. That's that's a really challenging thing to do, because faculty themselves, their identity is often tied to the technical. That's why they pursued a PhD. That's why they chose a university job. So you're really talking about having people begin to shift their identities. And so that is a cultural change within the department, and this does not happen quickly. We're talking about changes that happen slowly over the scales of years or even a decade. But the best way to begin is to just begin, to have conversations among your faculty, to talk about the importance of durable skills, to find out from your faculty, what are the shared values? And for us, one of our shared values is students and helping students. So we all have different ways of what we think that means, but just recognizing what your shared values are, connecting durable skills to them is very important. And I'll share one other thing that that we found quite helpful. Virginia Tech University, their electrical and computer engineering department had a NSF revolutionizing engineering departments grant. And one of the activities they did was make what are called persona cards, which are used in the design space, for their students. And so this will be a little hard to see, but I'm holding up a deck of cards that we made after interviewing our students and finding out where they wanted to go because a lot of students don't necessarily see engineering in an engineering career as their only career option. And so we made a card for the different types of personas that students have. And when we have these difficult conversations in my department, we all have a deck of these cards we bring, we lay them out. And essentially what happens is we say, how does this address this student, Logan, for example? How does this address the student Taylor or Robin who want different things out of the curriculum? And what you find there is the durable transferable skills really go across all the different personas of students you have in your department. Engineering students are not monolithic. I hope I hope that helps. Yes. That totally does. And, you know, I think, in terms of convincing, faculty about, you know, how to how to move forward. I think your graph that you shared was a really good one where, you know, this is the importance of both, the types of skills and, you know, if you are flowing into student success, then making sure that they are good on those levels is, is probably something that, you know, we should all be thinking about. So now, I have a question for everyone on the panel. And, it's really about, you know, here's the question. I find, here we go. I find students don't value learning durable skills. Equations are almost always the dominant priority. What is your guidance for teaching durable skills to an audience that doesn't prioritize learning durable skills? So I think each one of you is gonna have, a point of view on that. So maybe what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna maybe start with Denise. Thank you. I think my my new first starting point is always gonna be get that slide from Alan and show them first. What have I been doing to this point? I would say, I've been trying to recruit, employers to be a part of this because I think what happens is students get cues from different people as to what's really important. And I think employers are important to saying, and and really being clear about the importance of these durable skills. So I think I think, for me, that would be the main point of Lever. And how do I do that? I've been given opportunities to talk to, industry advisory boards that support departments, external review, groups that come to universities. And I always try to incorporate, a couple of things that they could help us educators on besides coming to our classroom. But how is that how are they how can industry really carry this message and make it extremely important, I think is what I would say is is the one of the key aspects. Mhmm. Great. Thank you for sharing that, Denise. How about, PJ, how about you? Any thoughts? I think, the the comments that were said, we're we're right on. I think we we definitely do our our recruiting teams definitely, you know, understand that balance when they're looking at talent. I do think we have speakers that visit schools when when invited. And perhaps that's an action where we could consider how do we have more, you know, as an action for this group. How do we have more industry speakers attend your classes to speak to the importance of both, so that students are realistic that that that culture is a very important fit when we're interviewing. I can tell you our teams look at both consistently when we're interviewing candidates. So, perhaps that's an opportunity for all of us to think about how could we have more guests visit your classes or or, your local recruiters, come and talk more with your folks. But I think that's an important way to send that message, but perhaps we're just not doing it consistently enough. Mhmm. Thank you. How about you, Alan? So, you know, everybody on the call who knows me knows I tend to go off at 90 degrees sometimes, and I'm gonna do that a little bit now. I think that absolutely a balance between technical and durable skills is needed, But there is no exact balance for every person. We tend, as we think about outcomes, to think about a production of students in a factory mode, that they all need certain things. But this is not engineering. This is education. And education is a different space, it's a very human space. And one thing I've learned over the years is that at any group of people, there's more variance than there is a central tendency to the mean. So I think some students are going to buy into the importance of durable skills. They're gonna focus on it. They may in fact need more help developing the technical skills. Other students may book us very narrowly on the technical skills, see that as what engineering is all about, and push back on the durable skills. And I would just urge you to think about working with students individually to the best you can and not think that one type of program is going to fit everybody's needs on this. Yes. Thank you so much. And I think, you know, as we are working in the realm of in program professional professional skills development, we are finding the same thing. You know, how do you get all students motivated to really go in for the assessment and get the tips on development and so on? And what we are finding is the more you sort of integrate it into the curriculum and, you know, rather than trying to do it over and above, the the more you are able to get the students to participate. So you if you if you make it part of a, a course, it's, you know, it it just becomes, easier rather than trying to do it on the side. So, you know, something that we are finding as well, and I it was really insightful for me to learn from you, as to how you're thinking about it. So here's another question for everyone. Coming from a managing director at Accenture in industry and now in adjunct, I find too many of my peers at the university are emphasizing academic communication instead of industry communication. Do you know of any resources to help professors understand the differences so they can teach communication better? Who would like to take this and go first? I I I I can make a stab at it. You know, I I had experience in the federal government, not an industry. So so my own background here is somewhat limited. But as I think I said in my slides, it really helps when making communication assignments to draw from documents that are used out in industry if that is your goal. If your goal is to create PhD students, then giving research papers and scholarly papers is a good model to go from. But I think it's really about looking at what current practices are and trying to model your communication assignments after that to a large extent. Yeah. That is such a great point, Alan. Thank you for sharing that. Denise, PJ, would you like to share your thoughts? I just briefly I've used resources before from the, Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. I I wanna go back to something that, Alan said, though, and that is what is industry communication? And I've spent about ten years in industry, and I will tell you across each one of those companies that communication was different, as I ascended to different ranks, the the type of communication I needed to have was have was different. So I would challenge the fact that maybe we certainly do need to not let them know let students know there's not one type of of communication that will be required. Also, each student may not need all these multiple forms. So it's the agility for to help them understand foundationally how to communicate, but also to a model through which to for them to make adjustments according to context. Thank you, Denise. Anything from you, PJ? I do think it's really important that we understand that industry we we will have multiple trainings on communication in industry depending on the circumstances ranging from cultural communications to communicating with data to telling stories. So I do think, understanding the organizations, it's very it's it's complex. And I think we have to get to the the the subtlety of it's gonna depend on the communication of that particular culture you're going to. And, so I think it's it's really gonna take, work to understand the the different communication strategy needed. So Yeah. Thank you. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts on this. And, unfortunately, that's all the time we have for questions. We do have a couple more, or a few more, I think, in the bank. But, hopefully, you know, all of this helped, to those that asked the questions. Thank you all for, attending the webinar today, and thank you to all of our wonderful presenters for sharing their insights and actionable strategies. Please note that everyone will receive a copy of the recording and the slides in their inbox in the next day or so, as well as a copy of the professional skills report. And then when we receive the resource, list from PJ, they will be sure to distribute that as well. So with that, we have come to the end of this webinar. Thank you all so much.