Engineers working as a team: socio-emotional and intercultural skills for multicultural environments

This workshop consists of an activity that aims to help engineering students to develop socio-emotional and intercultural skills. Through a usual situation for engineers at the beginning of their career, the participant will have the opportunity to experience a situation in which it will be necessary to work as a team, communicate, negotiate, and deal with colleagues of different nationalities. Engineering students need more than technical knowledge to face the demands of the 21st century (Downey et al., 2006; Passow, 2012). They also need to develop lifelong learning skills, such as socio-emotional and intercultural skills. Socio-emotional skills will enable future engineers to understand the social, moral and human values of a society. This will help them to work as a team, negotiate, manage, empathize, and deal better with colleagues, customers and the general public. Developing cross-cultural skills will provide the future engineer with the competence needed to work on complex global projects, immigrate to find work, collaborate and compete with colleagues of other nationalities, and work for international companies. Engineering schools are exploring ways to support and develop socio-emotional and intercultural competences in students. However, to date, studies on this subject are not as abundant as one would like (Ndubuisi et al., 2020). Seat, Parsons & Poppen (2001) brought that there is no secret that the quality of interpersonal, communication, and teaming skills in engineering graduates—termed performance skills—is of concern to both industry employers and engineering educators. These skills include communication abilities, interpersonal interaction, conflict mediation, team performance, understanding of technical culture, and sensitivity toward diverse populations due to race, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic standing. Besides learning how to work in teams, engineering students need to learn how to establish a collaborative culture in their future workplace and how to deal/communicate/negotiate with people from different countries and cultures (Josefsson, 2010; Rico-García & Fielden Burns, 2019)