Professional communication skills for engineering
professionals
Dept. of Tnformation Technology
aletta.nylen@it.uu.se
Abstract- Oral and written communication proficiency is
an important professional skill for engineering graduates.
However, developing these skills is often poorly integrated into
the engineering curriculum. We present a three
integrated approach to developing professional competence in
oral and written communication, which has been implemented
in the IT engineering program at a Swedish
university. In the paper we describe the educational approach,
the nature of assessment items and measures taken to ensure
progressive skills development in order to
graduates emerge with fuHy fledged communications skills.
The goal of the paper is to describe a successful model for
professional skills development, and to encourage a continuing
dialogue on how to best equip students with communication
skills for professional practice. (Abstract)
Keywords-engineering education; communication skills;
professional competencies; (key words)
I. INTRODUCTION
Professional engineers use communication for many
different purposes, e.g., pitching ideas, describing solutions,
reporting results, discussing work with collaborators,
customers, etc. Graduating students need to acquire the
necessary communication skills and become familiar with a
broad selection of styles during their education. The
American Computing and Accreditation Commission
(ABET) acknowledges this, e.g., in their general criteria for
accrediting engineering technology programs [1] where "an
ability to apply written, oral, and graphical communication
in both technical and non-technical environments; and an
ability to identifY and use appropriate technical literature;"
is listed as a required student outcome.
Many teachers regard teaching the main course subject
their only task and do neither teach nor comment on how
weil students communicate within the subject. TT faculty are
hesitant to grade communication skills due to a perceived
lack of language expertise or because they find the task
tedious [2]. At Uppsala University, a Swedish research
university, a student survey shows that isolated efforts, often
in the form of writing assignments or oral presentations, have
been made to improve the situation, but more often than not,
students do not get the feedback they need to be able to
develop their communication skills.
978-1-4673-5261-1/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE
Aletta Nylen Arnold Pears
Uppsala University
Uppsala, Sweden
arnold.pears@it.uu.se
In this paper we present an approach to developing
professional communication skills in engineering students.
When this work was started, we focused primarily on written
communication. The work has then gradually expanded
year towards including oral communication, but some of the work
presented here has a focus on writing. Oral and written
communication skills have a lot in common. For example,
research
explaining a concept requires being able to adjust the amount
of context that need to be presented in order for a specific
audience to be able to understand, no matter whether it is
ensure that
done orally or in writing. Hence development in written
communication will also be beneficial for oral
communication and vice versa. The differences between the
two forms of communication are, however, significant
enough to motivate that they both need to be practiced in the
education.
In the literature, there are two main approaches to
teaching professional communication skills - those where
communication is taught in dedicated courses [3] [4] and
those based on writing across the curriculum (WAC) [5],
where teaching is done in several courses throughout the
education. Furthermore, communication can be taught in
general language courses or in core subject courses, within
the discipline, where it can serve both to enhance learning
and to practice professional activities [6].
The approach presented here is an across the curriculum,
within the discipline approach to developing both oral and
written communication skills. The approach has been
implemented in the first three years of the TT engineering
program at Uppsala University. Our approach has been
developed to address problems that were discovered through
a student survey in 2012. We describe the ideas behind our
approach, what has been done to achieve progressive
development, how we work with assessment, and challenges
that we have addressed in our design. The ideas presented
constitute a framework that can be used to develop other
competencies such as group working skills and information
literacy and they are also valid for other branches of
engineering education.
11. BACKGROUND
The LT engineering program at Uppsala University, in
likeness with other engineering programs, aim at educating
students to become competent professionals. This means that
the students do not only have to learn their core subject, they
also have to develop a number of competencies that are
essential to professionals. We refer to OECD [7] for a
definition of a competency:
"A competency is more than just knowledge and skills. It
involves the ability to meet complex demands, by drawing on
and mobilising psychosocial resources (including skills and
attitudes) in a particular context."
In this work, we focus on communication ability for TT
engineers, which OECD describes by
"the ability to communicate effectively is a competency
that may draw on an individual 's knowledge of language,
practical IT skills and attitudes towards those with whom he
or she is communicating".
To graduate from engineering programs at Uppsala
University, the students must
"demonstrate ability in both national and international
contexts, to, orally and in writing, in dialogue with different
groups, clearly present and discuss their conclusions and the
l 20%
knowledge and arguments thatform the basis for these." [8]
This requires students to be skilled at communication
within their subject, and to be able to adjust their
communication to different situations and different audiences
that they may encounter professionally.
Study programs at Uppsala University, typically consist
of a collection of courses, most of which are in the program's
core subject. In the lT engineering program, isolated efforts
of including professional skills development have been done,
but there has been no previous attempt to structure this
development across the education.
In 2012, we explored the students' view on the current
writing training situation in the lT engineering program at
Uppsala University by conducting a survey. Although the
survey focuses on writing, the results have been used as a
basis for developing both oral and written communication
education.
In the survey, we asked the students
•
if they have had writing training previously
during their education,
•
if they think that writing training is relevant to
their education, and
•
how good writers they perceive themselves to
be.
Free text answers and comments have been analyzed
with the aim of finding a variation in how students
experience the use of written communication in TT and in
how useful they perceive the writing training they have had
to be for their skills development.
Students from one course in year 2 and two parallel
courses in year 3 were asked to participate. Out of the total
1 Translation from Swedish.
65 students that were asked, 27 participated which gives an
answer ratio of 42%.
Slightly less than half of the students answered the
survey. We cannot be sure of how representative this group
is for the total student body. However, opinions expressed by
a large number of students (>80%) in this sampIe would be
strongly represented even if all other students were of a
different opinion. Tt is also clear, both from statistics and
from free text answers, that both students who are interested
in and/or strong in writing and students who are not are
represented.
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
10%
0%
Unsure Yes No
Figure 1: Previous writing training.
A. Writing training
As shown in Figure 1, the survey showed that 60% of the
participating students say that they have had previous writing
training in their education, 20% that they have not had
writing training and 20% are not sure.
Students that reported having had writing training in their
education were asked to explain in what courses and how
that had affected their writing skills.
Half of those students (8 out of 16) reported having
writing training in 1-2 courses, 2 wrote that writing training
occurred only in project courses, and 6 reported that they had
writing training in many courses. Of the 9 students who
commented on how these courses has contributed to
development of their writing skills, 5 reported that they could
not see any development. 3 of these students also mentioned
that they had not gotten any feedback on their writing. 2
students mentioned that they had learned the general
framework for writing reports, and another 2 students
claimed that they had learned to write reports by the practice
they got from these courses.
We conclude that writing practice is useful and that we
need to make sure that the students get more of it. We also
see that not all students can learn from practice alone, and for
that reason, feedback is very important. This result agrees
with what is written about the need for feedback in [9]. In
our survey, one student expressed that
 "Many of the courses within the IT program has given
opportunity to practice writing, but never given specijic
feedback on the writing. It didn 't develop much, but rather
gave the opportunity to keep my previous standard up. ,,2
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Figure 2: Relevance of writing training.
B. Relevance
On the question how relevant writing training is to their
education (see Figure 2), 70% thinks that it is a 5 on a scale
1-5. Another 19% thinks it is a 4, 4% thinks it is a 3 and 7%
do not know. Apparently, students think that writing is
important for an lT engineer but this raises the question of
why students think that it is relevant and how they expect to
be using writing in their profession. In 11 free text comments
to this question, we find that
•
5 students think that is it generally important to
be able to express one self correctly but that it
has no particular importance for their profession
•
5 students think that it is important to be able to
present ones work by writing reports
•
2 students think that writing is important for
making their work (products and solutions) and
research available to others
lt is also mentioned that writing will be used for work
applications, communicating with coworkers and that good
writing makes it easier to get through with opinions.
Our conclusion is that students have a general feeling that
writing is important but their image of how it will be used in
their future profession is not clear. In order to get through to
students with the communication education that is provided,
we need to provide examples of different kinds of
professional communication.
C. Assessment ofwriting skills
The students were asked to assess their own writing skills
on a scale 1-5, where 5 is "good enough for writing a thesis",
3 is "good enough for my current level of studies" and 1 is "I
definitely need more training". 4% of the students chose not
to rate themselves. 7% rated themselves 2, 85% rated
2 Translation from Swedish.
50%
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Don't 5 4 3 2 1
know
Figure 3: Self-assessed writing skills.
themselves 3 or 4 and only one student was rated 5. The
results are presented in Figure 3.
These figures suggest that 92% of these students need
future writing training and at least 7% would have been
better of with more writing training earlier in the program
according to their own estimate. However, if we look at the
13 free text comments on this question, all but 3 students
either express that they need more writing training or that
they are unsure about the level of writing that is required.
The other 3 students express that their general writing skills
are good, but that they are unsure about their academic
writing skills or about writing within their discipline.
We expect the students to leam good general writing
skills in high school and to develop academic and discipline
specific writing skills at the university. Our interpretation is
therefore that the students lack of understanding of what
writing in their subject is, leads them to rate their own
writing higher than an lT teacher would and that improved
communication education throughout the program is needed.
lll. PROPOSED APPROACH
We will present the ideas and theory behind our approach
before describing how it has been implemented at Uppsala
University and explaining why this approach has been
chosen.
A. Frequent practice.
Students need reoccurring opportumtles to work on
improving their communication skills. Students that are
exposed to different writing assignments throughout their
studies perceive improvement in writing skills [10].
Presentation skills are also improved by practice [11].
B. Practicewithin the subject.
Skills achieved in dedicated courses are not necessarily
transferred to other contexts [12]. This means that general
language courses may not have the desired impact on the
students' development in professional communication,
which is in their core subject. In addition to being ways of
communicating, writing, explaining and discussing are also
ways of learning [13] and help to form the professional
identity [14]. If the practice is not performed within the
discipline, these advantages will be lost.
C. Instructions, feedback and reflection.
Moore concludes that without proper instructions,
guidance and feedback, the only effect of writing
assignments is to reinforce bad writing [9]. He also argues
that with proper guidance, students show significant
improvements both in writing skills and in content
knowledge. For oral presentations, [11] report getting good
skill development when using a combination of practice,
reflection and peer review. In [15], the authors report that
letting students reflect on their own work, in addition to
formal assessment, advances the development of
professional competencies.
D. Progression.
We believe that it is not only important that students
practice communication regularly and that they get feedback.
In order for the students to continue progressing over time, it
is important that the level of communication required in
assignments increases as the students mature. The feedback
should also meet students at their current level and promote
further development.
IV. TEACHING METHODS
To ensure that LT engineering students at Uppsala
University are subject to reoccurring communication
practice, communication proficiency is a prioritized learning
outcome for at least two core subject courses each of the first
three years of studies. This also makes it clear, for the
students, when communication is practiced and assessed and
stresses that development of communication skills is an
important part of the education.
Factors like restricted time, limited access to information
and the stressful situation makes assessing professional skills
through traditional exams difficult [16]. In our approach,
communication is therefore practiced and assessed in
different kinds of assignments, where students can prepare
for oral assessments and have time to work on written
material.
From the survey presented in Section TI, we learned that
students agree that writing is important for TT professionals
but when asked how it is used, they seem to lack an answer.
This also means that the character of communication in TT,
how it differs from general academic communication, is
unclear. By providing students with a variety of different
kinds of weil-chosen communication assignments, we hope
to acquaint the students with professional style
communication and highlight the communication skills that
are specific to TT.
In [2], Garvey presents a categorization of student
writing with particular examples of assignments in each
category. The communication assignments that our students
encounter during the first three years are best described by
Garvey's categories "Summarizing assignments", "Programs
as writing", "Reviews/critiques of the writing of others" and
"More creative kinds of writing" although, in our case, the
work is sometimes presented orally. "Team-based writing"
also occurs. Examples of assignments that our students
encounter are paper reviews (summarizing), project
proposals (creative), lab and project reports (programs),
literature discussions (summarizing, reviews) and project
presentations (programs). Sometimes our students present
and critique each other's work resulting in assignments that
span three of the categories, summarizing, programs and
reVIews.
Another important component in making students
familiar with communication in their discipline is to provide
examples. We are collaborating with the university's writing
center to form a database of examples of student and
professional writing. Reading and presenting research papers
is also an activity that contributes.
In oral communication, students need to become skilied
in presentation techniques, but it is equally important that
they become skilIed in discussing their subject. In addition to
being able to present ideas and solutions, they need to be
able to relate to and ask and answer questions about material
that is being presented and they need to be able to
communicate efficiently about their work when cooperating
with others in teams.
Most approaches to oral communication education
described in literature address presentation skills [4] [11].
We find that there is also a great need for practicing
discussing the subject of studies. Students struggle with
describing issues related to TT, concepts, solutions, etc. both
orally and in writing. In discussions, this is even harder since
a good description has to be provided without having as
much time to think about how to explain what they want to
say as when given a written assignment or preparing a
presentation. This is obvious even when students are to
describe and discuss what they have previously written
about. The need for oral communication training that goes
beyond presentation skills is supported by the work of Ruff
and Carter [17], where professional communication goals
were identified through focus groups and interviews with
software engineers and managers.
To practice and assess discussion skills, we work with
oral assessment of both theoretical content and practical
work. With the help of follow up questions, the teacher can
create a situation where the student can no longer rely on
previously prepared answers but has to create explanations
and solutions on the fly. Course evaluations show that
students experience that they need to have a thorough
understanding of course material to pass this kind of oral
assessment. Teachers experience that oral assessments make
students aware of what it means to understand contents and
thus seem to encourage deep learning. In addition, they find
that need for communication practice is exposed and that
student performance is drastically improved with practice.
Teaching the main course content is the primary concern
for many teachers and they do neither teach nor comment on
how the students communicate in their work. Previous
literature [2] [18] report that LT faculty hesitate to grade
 Beginners, first course
Students should be able to
1. identiJY different types of text in the fJeld and describe their structure.
2. write a text that reproduces information from other sources.
1
3. write a text that is suitable for the intended reader.
1
4. write a text that has a clear theme and is appealing to the intended reader.
5. write text that is Iinguistically correct for spelling, paragraphing, punctuation, etc.
6. use references and citations correctly.
7. discuss what information is necessary and what information is sufficient for a text.

First and second year

Students should be able to
I. provide constructive feedback on the work of others with the help of checklists.
2. write summaries of simple scientific articles.
3. describe and evaluate their own work in writing, e.g., lab report. The report should have a good structure.
4. apply principles of necessary and sufficient information in your own texts.

Second and third year

Students should be able to
1. give constructive feedback on the work of others.
2. describe and evaluate larger projects in writing. A special focus is on selection of appropriate levels of abstraction in different
parts of the text.
3. use fJgures and diagrams in a proper manner.
4. produce "well-prepared" text in Swedish.
5. write original text in English.

Figure 4: Progression goals for writing.

writing since they do not have language expertise and since students to reflect on their own performance. We share the
they consider evaluating writing to be a tedious task. experiences presented in [15], that students lack experience
in reflecting on their work. Since reflection does not only
We collaborate with the university's writing center to
advance development of skills, but is also an important tool
offer support for teachers when it comes to making
for achieving lifelong learning if incorporated in professional
instructions for writing assignments and material on how to
practice, we make reflection a mandatory part of selected
write. The writing center also supports the students by giving
assignments spread throughout the education.
instruction lectures and writing aid, e.g., in the form of
comments on student work before the final submission. To encourage progressive development, we have defined
learning outcomes for written communication, presented in
Providing feedback, especially to written work, is a time
Figure 4. The learning outcomes are linked to different
consuming task for teaching staff. We sometimes let senior
course levels. The learning outcomes are designed for
students help with grading to reduce the teacher's workload
students that are native in Swedish, not in English. At
and thus the teacher's task shifts from grading large numbers
Uppsala University, there are four course levels during the
of assignments to supervising a group of students and
first three years of study. At each level, students should
making sure that their grading is at an appropriate level for
fulfill the outcomes from previous levels as weil as the ones
the course. Peer reviewing, students giving feedback to each
from their current level. The fourth level, which does not
other, is also sometimes regarded as being a time saving
occur in Figure 4, is the level of Bachelor thesis work and
alternative which has the additional advantage that students
does not contain any new learning outcomes. A more
learn from reviewing as weIl as from doing the assignment.
detailed description and an analysis of the learning outcomes
Investigations in [19] support our impression that students
in relation to competencies that are needed to fulfill them is
need training and education, both in giving and responding
presented in [20].
to feedback. Since peer reviewing is used frequently,
students get to practice giving feedback. For written At the first level, for beginner students, the focus is on
assignments, students must sometimes respond to feedback high school level writing skills and general academic writing
by improving their work. skills such as proper academic style language and correct use
of references. At later levels, other aspects, e.g., being able to
For oral presentation, [11] report student development
explain and describe solutions at appropriate levels of
when using a combination of practice, reflection and peer
abstraction, are added. A typical example from TT is that to
review. When it comes to writing, our investigations support
explain an algorithm or a program, you need to provide a
the results of [19], that students do not find feedback from
high level description, a figure or a natural language
peers as trustworthy and beneficial as feedback from
description. Just presenting excerpts from code is not
teachers. In our approach, we use peer review both for oral
sufficient at the second and third levels.
and written work but for written work, we make sure that
students also get feedback from teachers or teaching The learning outcomes serve as a structure, both for
assistants. We also make it part of the assignment for teachers and for students, for achieving progression in the
level of assignments, the quality of student work and the
grading criteria for assignments. Because of the many
similarities between written and oral communication, it is
easy to adjust the learning outcomes to suit both kinds of
communication. To help students appreciate their own
development, assignment solutions, feedback and reflections
can be used to compile a student portfolio.
V. IMPLEMENTATTON
The communication training starts at the beginners level,
in the very first course in the TT program and is continued in
five more courses spread over the first three years. By the
end of the third year, the students show that they fulfill all
communication goals discussed above in an independent
project corresponding to a bachelor thesis.
In the first course, the writing education focuses on the
difference between academic texts and general texts with a
special emphasis on the style used in different types of LT
related texts. For example, the students learn the structure of
academic reports and they start to practice explaining LT
concepts in a precise and unambiguous manner. Since the
students do not yet have deep subject knowledge, typical
assignments consist of presenting LT concepts and discussing
them in relation to society and everyday life. The texts are
directed towards audiences that are at the same level as the
students themselves, audiences that do not have deep
understanding of TT. An important goal at this level is that
the students learn to use text sources in a proper manner.
To practice oral communication, the students are required
to do most of the course work in groups. In addition to being
an arena for practicing discussion skills, the groups can serve
as a motivator for students to perform better and learn more
and thus the group can have a positive influence on students'
study habits [21].
The rest of the first year is dedicated to practicing
describing and evaluating the students' own work. The
students present their own solutions to programming
assignments, both orally and in writing. They evaluate their
solutions and draw conclusions e.g., about performance of
algorithms. They start working on presentation skills by
presenting small projects to the c1ass. An important task for
students during this period is to provide feedback on the
work of other students. By doing this, the students get to see
both good and bad examples and how they affect the general
quality of texts and presentations. At this level, peer
reviewing is guided by checklists that help students focus on
relevant properties of texts and presentations rather than
getting stuck in commenting on details, such as spelling
errors.
In the second and third years, this work continues but as
student projects get larger, the demand for descriptions at
different levels of abstraction increases. Although the
students have used illustrations earlier, the emphasis on
proper selection and use of illustrations is increased. At this
level, we also require that students relate their work to other
work in the field properly.
Peer reviewing is still used, but with less aid from
checklists as we expect students at this level to have a
general knowledge of what to look for. Group work and oral
examination is also used, but as the students' subject
knowledge increases, so does the required level of
correctness in descriptions and of how students can draw
conc1usions from course contents.
In the later years, students are required to present their
work to different audiences ranging from novice students to
professionals depending on the purpose of the different
assignments. An example from the third year is a writing
assignment where students are required to explain database
concepts and give illustrative examples directed towards
audiences not knowing anything about databases. Another
example, from a concurrent programming course in the
second year, is a project proposal where the students have to
seil an idea while giving enough technical background to
convince a professional that their idea is realistic and should
be accepted.
VI. DISCUSSION
We have described a model for professional skills
development and how it has been implemented to develop
communication skills in LT engineering students at Uppsala
University. Through a student survey, we have found that the
isolated efforts that have previously been implemented in the
program, students have encountered communication practice,
but that feedback and progression have been sparse. lt is also
c1ear that students have a vague and incomplete picture of
how communication will be used in their future profession.
We argue that an across the curriculum approach is needed
to ensure that students encounter a broad variety of
professional communication activities and thus develops a
knowledge of what communication in their discipline is and
how it is used. Such an approach also makes it possible to
progress the level of communication activities the students
are to engage in and how they are graded.
Our approach has been successful in that it has engaged
faculty in participating in developing students'
communication skills to a much larger extent than
previously. The model have not been used to a full extent
long enough to present definitive results on how student
performance is improved, but the preliminary impression is
that students are adopting study habits more directed towards
deep learning and that students' oral communication skills
are developing.
Groups are natural training grounds for communication.
Hence, an interesting future extension of this work is to
inc1ude group and project working skills. A weil functioning
group can have a positive impact on learning that would be
interesting to take advantage of in professional skills
development.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Thanks to Sofia Cassel for collaboration in development
of the writing skill education. Thanks also to Kar! Marklund
for fruitful discussions concerning oral assessment.
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