ABSTRACT
Undergraduate engineering programmes worldwide aim to equip their graduates with specialised skills applicable to a career in the discipline. These programmes increasingly include instruction in professional communication skills by language educators. Engineering faculty often request that students be instructed in discipline-specific professional skills, while universities may expect graduates to have developed a broad range of transferable skills, often expressed as ‘graduate attributes’.
Language educators developing professional communication courses for engineering students need to consider how specific their instruction should be, given that the communication needs of engineers will change as they transition from frontline technical roles to managerial positions when ascending the career ladder. This chapter presents four best practices for the design of professional communication courses for engineering students, based on the experience of course developers in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. These principles attempt to meet the expectations of subject faculty that their students will learn discipline-specific professional skills, whilst addressing the longer-term communication needs of engineers. These four best practices are likely to be relevant to other language educators facing a similar mix of expectations and requests from subject faculty and academic leaders in their own institutions.
