Building 21st Century Skills through Development Engineering

At the University of California at Berkeley, the vision of a 2020 Engineer with the skills to solve the global challenges of today is being realized through an emergent program focused on design for social impact. A minor for Ph.D. students, Development Engineering (DevEng) is a degree program and accompanying ecosystem that aims ". . . to create technology interventions in accordance with the needs and wants of individuals living within complex, low-resource settings.'' This paper explores how the competencies conveyed through the DevEng program overlap with and go beyond the criteria laid out for the Engineer of 2020. Today's engineering student engages with a wide variety of global problems, only some of which are addressed by solely technological solutions. Academic programs across the country, including DevEng, have recognized that a unique skillset is needed to address these complex challenges. As a result, there is a growing collection of academic programs (e.g., DevEng, Design for Social Impact, Humanitarian Engineering) that train technologically adept engineers to work in multifunctional teams while attempting to have a positive social impact on the world. In this paper, the authors examine the skill development activities that students in the DevEng Program are exposed to and whether they meet or exceed the goals and principles of the 2020 Engineer. The paper further describes the DevEng learning objectives and accompanying ecosystem opportunities to determine whether the program is on track in providing students with a multidisciplinary set of skills and diverse experiences that effectively train the Engineer of 2020.