UNDERSTANDING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPETENCY-BASED APPROACH IN AN ENGINEERING TRAINING PROGRAMME

Engineering and design courses are often rooted in strong professional practices. Recent graduates often express a gap between the educational content of their degree courses and professional practices. The competency-based approach enables educational professional to fill this gap. Thus, the question we are asking in this paper is the following: if the competency-based approach is introduced into an engineering school in a structured way, how do the various stakeholders react to and take ownership of this new teaching method? To answer this question, we will use two types of data collected as part of the creation of a ‘Bachelor of Science and Technology - Sustainable Design’ programme. The first set of data comes from a questionnaire distributed among the stakeholders of an engineering school. The aim of this questionnaire is to gain a better understanding of their understanding of the competency-based approach and the means they are using to implement it. The second set of data was obtained from a recording of a competency-based approach training course for the same stakeholders. This second set of data enables us to understand the reaction of stakeholders to the technical issues involved in implementing the competency-based approach within a training course and an institution. This paper shows how the competency-based approach enables stakeholders of a training programme to improve their pedagogical activities.