Technical challenges of today’s world require engineers from different traditional engineering disciplines to work together. Therefore, various global engineering communities underscore the importance of communicating engineering information across disciplines as an important professional skill for engineers to possess. Many bachelor engineering programs already include ‘collaboration, teamwork and communication’ as a separate intended learning outcome (ILO). A scoping review revealed that education in engineering communication has received little attention over the last decades. That is why the question was raised what the current status is of engineering communication education across the engineering programs of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. First, a desk-top analysis was performed of the course goals (CG) of all courses in year 2023-2024 of 12 BSc engineering programs. To this end, engineering communication was categorized into five ‘languages’: written, oral, graphic, equation/math, and programming communication, representing the distinct way in which engineers can communicate engineering information. Second eight lecturers from seven programmes and six students from five programmes were interviewed in focus groups. Lecturers were interviewed on associations they had with the five communication categories, their relative importance, and teaching and assessment methods for engineering communication. The students were asked to express their opinion via an interactive voting system after which the results were discuss. Topics were their associations regarding the five communication categories as these is novel approach, and their interpretation of these categories being offered sufficiently (5-point Likert scale). The desk top analysis showed that engineering communication is offered in 31% of the courses (min 24% and max 42%). Written communication has the largest share being present as CG in 51% of the courses (min 29% and max 79%), and programming has the lowest share being present as CG in 22% of the courses (min 4% and max 38%). The findings also showed that a) communication education is offered in projects which are monodisciplinary (within the BSc engineering program that students are enrolled in) and that b) descriptions of engineering communication CGs are generically formulated. Recognition of the five communication categories was confirmed by the associations made by the lecturers and students. In line with the prevalence of CG in the desk top results, lecturers indicated that written, graphic and oral are relevant categories for communication with all stakeholders, whereas equation and programming were relevant for communication amongst engineering peers. Noticeably, despite the focus on written communication, students feel less trained (score 3.00 of 5) in written communication compared to equation/mathematical communication (score 3.67 of 5). Lecturers indicate that individual assessment of writing skills is a huge challenge for large student groups. They suggest assessing progress in engineering communication competency in a learning line, which also stimulates the learning from the feedback they provide to students. In conclusion, to improve engineering education it is suggested to formulate engineering communication ILOs and GC SMART and work towards an overarching learning line across courses and programs to enhance true multidisciplinary training.

Keywords: Engineering, communication, languages, evidence-informed.