Digital skills to enhance engineering

The professional skills required to be a successful engineer continue to grow and expand as the engineering disciplines evolve. In the United Kingdom, the Engineering Council has released the latest version of the Accreditation of Higher Education Programmes (AHEP). AHEP4 as it has become known covers a wide range of topics central to engineering disciplines. As well as traditional core professional and subject requirements for engineering this document introduces challenges for the future such as sustainability, EDI, and cybersecurity. In addition, there is an expectation that appropriate digital skills for engineers form part of the toolkit for engineers as they move towards chartered engineering status. This paper discusses the digital skills that will enable engineers to develop their skill set as engineering professionals, enhance their employability by developing digital skills in the context of their engineering specialism and ensure that they have the digital skills to enable their activities to contribute to the betterment of society. In the paper the work done to embed digital skills in the engineering curriculum will be discussed. We will then go on to discuss the work done with engineering employers to identify the digital skills expectations for graduates entering employment and finally how the continued professional development process for digital skills can be embraced as engineers move through their careers. The session will conclude with a discussion on how colleagues from the UK and from Malaysia can work together to develop a framework to support engineers in developing their digital skills.