| Global Competition, Grand Challenges, and New Skill Sets for 21st Century Engineers: The Charles M. Vest Plenary at ASEE 2008 |
By Kelly Roncone Zappas, TMS News Editor
Posted Date: 7/2/2008
 It's not enough to be technically proficient anymore. To be successful, a 21st century engineer must also have a wide variety of both communication and business skills. And at the same time that engineering education becomes more complex, there is a need to attract more students to the field to ensure an adequate engineering workforce for the future.
As president of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Charles M. Vest is all too aware of the trends in engineering education and workforce development in the United States. And as a former educator with the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he is also aware of both the challenges to educators and the efforts to reverse these trends.
Vest spoke to an audience of engineering educators about these issues at the 2008 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, the meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 23. There, Vest delivered the plenary talk, "Engineering Education for the 21st Century," which will be available through the ASEE web site.
A Changing Discipline
In 1967, Vest was working as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. At that time, the issues that he and his fellow educators discussed included: how to make engineering exciting for first-year students, the importance of instilling an understanding of business concerns, how to effectively communicate the role of engineers, and how to deal with ethical concerns. Now, 40 years later, educators are still wrestling with these same issues—and then some. The skills that engineers now need in order to be effective go far beyond technical know-how. There is also a need to develop leadership and teamwork skills, to be culturally aware and multilingual, and to be mindful of issues like sustainable development and globalization.
"Our world is changing," said Vest. While the second half of the 20th century was dominated by physics, electronics, high-speed communications, and transportation concerns, the 21st century will look at issues like energy, water, sustainability, biology, and information. Vest reviewed some of the grand challenges that engineers will face in the future, as identified by the NAE Grand Challenges of Engineering project.
Continuing into this century, Vest has identified two new frontiers for engineering: from sophisticated, small-scale science to large-scale issues of societal importance. The first frontier deals with very small, technically complex areas, such as biomaterials, information technologies, and nanotechnology. The second looks at macrosystems challenges such as energy, the environment, health care, manufacturing, and communications. These issues are larger and more complex, but of great societal significance.
"The payoff will come from bridging these frontiers," said Vest, from applying small-scale science to high-priority issues.
The Role of Engineering Educators and Universities
Vest was a member of the committee that developed the influential Rising above the Gathering Storm report released in 2005 by the National Academies Press. This report found that, while the United States still leads the world in terms of R&D investments, the country is losing share to other emerging areas of the world in both R&D investment and education. The country's global share has declined in every category from 1986 to 2003, including the number of science and engineering B.S. and Ph.D. degrees awarded and domestic R&D.
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