Using coaching to develop transversal skills in engineering education

Conference Key Areas: Building the capacity and strengthening the educational competences of engineering educators; Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills Keywords: Academic coaching, transversal skills, coaching-informed pedagogy, student success, student agency Abstract This idea market explores how academic coaching can be used to develop transversal skills in engineering students, addressing the persistent gap between recognising the importance of these skills and explicitly supporting their development in curricula. Drawing on systematic reviews of academic coaching interventions, it focuses on converting evidence into actionable design principles that engineering educators can apply in practice. The work synthesises coaching studies to identify patterns in effectiveness across intervention design, delivery modes, and theoretical framing. Findings indicate that academic coaching is associated with improvements in academic performance, retention, confidence, wellbeing, and student agency, particularly in interventions of sufficient duration (typically 12 hours or more over several weeks), delivered in one-to-one formats, and facilitated by trained or professional coaches. At the same time, variability in coaching models and cost implications highlight the need for context-sensitive implementation. Based on these insights, the session proposes a student-focused coaching model, presented as a designer’s guide for implementation. It also introduces an emerging lecturer-focused approach that integrates coaching-informed practices into teaching, offering a complementary pathway for embedding transversal skill development within existing curricula.