Teaching professional skills to engineering students with enterprise resource planning (ERP): an international project

The engineering education community has long recognized that graduates not only need to possess sound technical knowledge in their chosen disciplines but also need to be better educated in the areas of communication skills, teamwork, leadership and other professional skills. Despite the recognized importance, it is not easy to develop and implement a curriculum that fosters such skills. Also subsequent outcome assessment of the achieved skill levels poses many challenges and demands much creativity. This paper describes a joint experience between Syracuse University in USA and Carlos III University in Spain. The experience shows that an industry-scale ERP solution can be used to develop professional skills for engineering students and improve academic curricula. Although ERP solutions have been used in higher education, this is probably the first time that an ERP system is utilized primarily for fostering professional skills. Findings from this experience are discussed as well as several opportunities for further development.