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Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
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154 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

ence disciplines. It is fascinating that all of this information is available
at the click of a keyboard key.

Future Learning Paradigms

The new engineering curriculum must take into account that in the
future students will learn in a completely different way. Up to now,
engineering schools have developed curricula by creating scenarios or
predicting the problems we expect to face. In doing so, we have focused
on knowledge rather than skills.
Curricula based on specific knowledge are built from the bottom
up. In this teaching paradigm, we dissect a hypothetical problem into a
myriad of pieces. We then teach about each of these pieces, anticipating
that we will be able to develop a solution by combining them. As the
complexity of the problem increases, however, the relative size of the
building blocks becomes smaller. Eventually, the effort involved in learn-
ing about the small pieces is so overwhelming that we can no longer
synthesize the original problem—the parts become more important than
the whole. Engineers whose education is built from the bottom up can-
not comprehend and address big problems. They get lost in irrelevant
details.

Solving Unknown Problems
In a scenario-free future, there are no anticipated problems, only
anticipated challenges and possible opportunities. The future engineer-
ing curriculum should be built around developing skills and not around
teaching available knowledge. We must focus on shaping analytic skills,
problem-solving skills, and design skills. We must teach methods and
not solutions. We must teach future engineers to be creative and flex-
ible, to be curious and imaginative.
Future engineers must understand and appreciate the impact of so-
cial/cultural dynamics on a team environment. They must appreciate
the power of a team relative to the importance of each individual’s tal-
ent. They must know how to communicate effectively and how to think
globally. Engineering curricula must focus on developing skills that en-
able them to address the unknown.

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