Social skills: a key factor for engineering students to develop interpersonal skills

• Autores: Daniele Carolina Lopes, Mateus Cecílio Gerolamo, Zilda Aparecida Pereira Del Prette, Marcel Andreotti Musetti, Almir Del Prette
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 31, no. Extra 1 (Parte B), 2015 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Engineering Education: Beyond Technical Skills Part II—Case Studies Linked to the Promotion of Specific Technical Skills), págs. 405-413
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • The development of interpersonal skills during a student’s undergraduate course is critical because the more developed thesocial skills the more chances to satisfactorily deal with the demands of different environments and interlocutors. Thatbeing the case the university should include interpersonal development as part of its academic goals. Some universities tryto achieve those objectives through ‘‘junior’’ enterprises, continuing education programs, university-industry outreachprograms and so on. Therefore, this paper describes a successful experience conducted in the university for developingengineering students’ interpersonal skills. Two different strategies were adopted to promote the Engineering students’development of interpersonal skills: the PRODIP (Interpersonal Professional Development Program) and academicdisciplines focusing on social skills and leadership. The PRODIP program had the participation of 41 engineering studentsin one of its four consecutive annual editions. The students’ social skills were assessed before, during, and after the end ofthe program, and also three months after (follow-up). The program, which lasted four months, was composed of 15 weeklysessions that included intervention and theoretical aspects related to the practical training of successful social interactions.The participants in PRODIP improved their social skills after the program was implemented and this improvementcontinuedover time (follow-up).The social skills course was applied in two ways,the first one, a brief format, was offeredto29 students, with three four-hour meetings each and addressed topics such as communication, assertiveness and workingskills. The second one in a larger format, was offered to 40 students, it consisted of 15 lessons of two hours each. Theparticipants reported the importance of social skills as a prerequisite for teamwork and internship programs, whichconstitutes the transition from student to the professional workplace. The need to plan strategies in order to promote thestudents’ interpersonal development is discussed.