Abstract:

The current concern for sustainability in education and business represents a great opportunity to connect the needs of society with both of them. Since students of the present will become employees in the future, education and training systems should take into account the different dimensions of sustainability. This aspect becomes very relevant for engineering disciplines where students are prepared to design, improve and manage new or already existing systems to be more efficient. Traditionally when measuring efficiency and selecting the final solution much more emphasis had been put only on the economic aspects, being neglected the environmental and social impacts. Recent events, such the climatic change, for instance, give us signs that this trend should change.

The Agenda 2030 and their sustainable development goals (SDG) may assist Engineering Higher Schools to create synergies with employers in order to add value in our society. To this end, it is necessary to know the expectations of employers regarding the competencies that students should acquire in terms of sustainability at the end of their engineering studies. Indeed, more systematic efforts are needed to increase the presence of the SDGs in higher education institutions oriented to the employers’ requirements. But, in addition, if future graduates are trained in SDGs, they will be able to lead companies towards greater sustainability. This is the essence of the educational innovation and improvement project (PIME-I/2021/1790) developed at the ETSII at UPV.

Within the context of the above PIME, the objective of this paper is to perform a literature review of existing studies about the sustainability skills that employers expect from engineering students in order to consider them when integrating SDGs in teaching. As a future research line, it is devised to complement the results of this study with questionnaire surveys to the main employers of the ETSII graduates.

Keywords:

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), Higher Education, Engineering, Employers.