Abstract:

After several years of research and development of a strategy for the study, analysis and introduction of recommendations and instruments for improvement and innovation in the teaching methodologies of engineering education at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), this work is presented for show with objective data the students' own evaluation of their level of interpersonal competence in comparison of the years 2023 and 2024.

It has been a long journey since the research began in 2019, including obtaining, validating, and publishing an entire reference framework for interpersonal skills, for the first time, designed and validated by engineering students and in Spanish, INGEMPRENDE. Now it is about transmitting our findings to the academic community and, through comparison, beginning another phase of the research that will lead us to determine how the UPM students' self-perception evolves year after year and if there are any correlations of didactic interest.

The methodological part is based on the “alphabet of social and personal competencies of the future engineer at UPM” which established 26 competencies identified and validated by the students surveyed themselves. Starting from this established framework of interpersonal, social, and "soft" competencies and aligned with the needs of companies in the engineering sector, we can continue analysing data from the beginning of a historical series of results offered by students. The first progress we obtained in 2023 can now be compared with the new random sample (n=82) this year based on a student census of the different UPM Engineering Schools that have participated in the project.

The discussion in this work revolves around the historical and generational evolution of student cohorts as they enter university or advance in their studies. Before, we had no reference framework in Spanish to establish a series of interpersonal skills to evaluate. And once this is achieved, we must now provide evidence on possible relationships or not in the answers offered in order to verify: How does the student himself interpret his preparation to enter the labour market?

In the comparative data, it is significant that this year 2024 there is still a lack of knowledge of the concepts: soft skills and gamification, with 5 points more in the negative responses; However, the use of games as a didactic element hardly varies and increases by one point (from 61% to 62%), which leads us to think that there is no conceptual but practical transmission of educational innovation applied to teaching through serious games.

We want to continue giving strength to our arguments in order to convince teaching colleagues to take these data into account and improve their teaching methods with new teaching techniques, improving the transmission not only of technical knowledge but also of the personal and social knowledge necessary for the engineer.

Thus, with this communication, we are going to make an original contribution of high didactic value to present the results and their analysis of soft skills in the field of engineering of the UPM students themselves. These data are very interesting and surprising, as well as the analysis of their consequences, which will lead us in the future to be able to adjust our curricula to include educational innovation themes and activities that improve these competencies.

Keywords:

Soft skills, educational innovation, engineering, skills, curricula.