Competencies
Rethinking the Competencies that Engineers Need to Flourish as Professionals
Each institution of higher education that educates engineers has a responsibility to question, to investigate, and to assess the kind of engineer they are producing. While some responsibility is help with accrediting bodies, like ABET, institutions hold this responsibility too.
The competencies that engineers need continue to evolve and this means we must continue to evolve as educators and as higher education institutions to support the development of future engineers.
The Vision: Beyond the Technical
While many programs silo “soft skills,” Educating the Whole Engineer integrates them into the very core of our curriculum. We educate the Whole Engineer by weaving together:
Engineering Fundamentals: Deep technical expertise and design prowess.
Character Education: The stable, deep dispositions that shape how we act and lead.
Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM): The ability to identify opportunities and create extraordinary value.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM)
In partnership with the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), we empower students through the 3 Cs:
Curiosity: Exploring the unknown and questioning the status quo.
Connections: Integrating information from diverse sources to gain deep insight.
Creating Value: Identifying unexpected opportunities to benefit society.
Character: The Heart of Engineering
Character isn’t just about following rules—it’s about habits of excellence. We’ve mapped specific virtues to the engineering journey to help students navigate complex ethical landscapes.
Rethinking Engineering Education
Engineering is often seen as a technical profession, focused on equations, technical systems, and problem-solving. We believe engineers must be more than technical experts. They must also be leaders, innovators, ethical decision-makers, and collaborators who contribute meaningfully to society.
Engineering today goes beyond equations and code. Global challenges—climate change, health equity, sustainable technology, and AI ethics—demand professionals who bring not only technical know-how but also creativity, character, resilience, and social responsibility.
National organizations and industry consistently call for engineers who can:
Solve complex problems with creativity and systems thinking
Lead diverse teams with empathy and integrity
Communicate effectively across cultures and disciplines
Understand the social, ethical, and environmental impact of their work
We recognize that ABET accreditation and its seven student outcomes provide an essential foundation for engineering education—but they are only the starting point. While ABET establishes minimum learning outcomes for engineering graduates, it does not limit programs from innovating and reimagining what engineering education can be.
Engineering education should never be reduced to an exercise in compliance. It must be about true preparation for the 21st-century engineer—professionals who combine technical excellence with character, creativity, and a deep sense of social responsibility.
ABET sets the minimum bar. Educating the Whole Engineer raises it.
Rethinking Higher Education
Just as ABET outcomes set a floor but not the ceiling for engineering, higher education as a whole faces a similar challenge. Too often, colleges and universities are organized around rigid disciplinary siloes that separate technical knowledge from the humanities, social sciences, and arts. This fragmentation limits students’ ability to see connections, integrate knowledge, and address the complex problems of our time.
Reimagining education for the 21st century means moving beyond compliance-driven models toward interdisciplinary, integrative learning. The most pressing challenges—climate change, public health, artificial intelligence, global inequality—do not belong to one discipline alone. They require solutions that weave together engineering and ethics, science and society, business and policy, creativity and character.
Educating the Whole Engineer is one example of how higher education can transform. It shows that when we dismantle siloes and cultivate holistic learning environments, students are not only prepared for their first job—they are prepared to lead lives of purpose, adapt across careers, and contribute to human flourishing. and the human-centered impact of technology.
Whole Engineer Competencies
Whole Engineer competencies set a bigger and bolder vision to educate engineers not just for their first job, but for a lifetime of careers.
These Whole Engineer competencies are not an exhaustive list, but an initial illustration of how we move beyond compliance toward deeper preparation of technical competence, character cultivation, and entrepreneurial mindset to deliver societal impact:
Problem-Solving with Complexity: Tackling open-ended, ambiguous challenges with creativity, systems thinking, and evidence-based decision-making.
Design with Impact: Approaching design as human-centered, sustainable, and socially conscious—considering global, economic, and environmental contexts.
Communication Across Audiences: Writing, speaking, and visualizing ideas effectively for technical experts, policymakers, and the public alike.
Ethical and Professional Responsibility: Embedding ethical reasoning, integrity, and civic awareness throughout practice—not just in one course.
Leadership and Teamwork: Leading diverse teams, practicing empathy, and cultivating collaboration across disciplines and perspectives.
Experimentation and Data Literacy: Moving beyond routine lab work to integrate modern tools, critical analysis, and reflective interpretation of data.
Lifelong Learning and Growth Mindset: Cultivating adaptability, resilience, curiosity, and the ability to learn from failure.
Character and Values: Integrating virtues such as humility, courage, compassion, and integrity into professional identity.
Entrepreneurial and Systems Mindset: Seeking opportunities to create value, innovate responsibly, and understand the broader systems in which engineering operates.
To achieve these broader competencies, we cannot rely on engineers alone to educate the next generation of engineers. Technical expertise is essential, but it is only one dimension of preparation. Developing engineers who lead with character, communicate across cultures, and navigate ethical and societal complexity requires the insights of social scientists, humanists, policy experts, business leaders, and community partners.
By bringing these voices into engineering education, we:
Unpack ethics and responsibility through philosophy, history, and religious studies.
Develop cultural competence and empathy through the social sciences, anthropology, and global studies.
Explore policy and societal impact with political science, economics, and law.
Cultivate creativity and imagination through the arts, design, and humanities.
Engineering education must be a shared enterprise across disciplines. Only then can we prepare graduates who not only meet ABET’s foundational outcomes but transcend them—becoming engineers who integrate knowledge, act with wisdom, and help solve society’s most pressing challenges.
Read the Research. Download the paper today.