The Challenge of Educating Engineers for a Close, Crowded and Creative World

The world that is emerging based on the development and everyday use of new technologies is a world that can be described as close, crowded and creative. Studies have highlighted that traditional curricula and pedagogical methods for engineering education are deficient in terms of developing and nurturing key skills required by engineers to succeed in this world. The challenge for the engineering academic leaders of today is to begin with the end in mind: to begin with a description of the competences that the engineer of the future should have in order to succeed in their aspirations as an engineer, and then to reverse engineer both the curriculum and pedagogical approaches to enable the desired outcome. This chapter describes what is meant by a close, crowded and creative world: the world in which engineering graduates must learn to practice. It then proposes three different possible scenarios for the world of 2030 and discusses the key skills that engineers in 2030 should possess in order to succeed as engineers. The chapter concludes with recommendations on how to address the challenges of educating engineers for a close, crowded and creative world