Fostering and Assessing Soft Skills of Engeneering Students

This paper presents and discusses the results of a research project aiming at assessing the achievement of soft skills. To measure and assess their level, a standard questionnaire was used. The test was carried out with two different groups of students, or recently graduated, in the field of engineering as well as in the field of education. The total number of participants has been 489. This allowed us to make a comparative analysis in order to detect specific engineering soft skills. The research project was fostered by the idea that present changes ask the higher education systems to re-think and re-design the pedagogical approaches to both didactics and to the objectives of didactics at all levels, university curricula included. In this paper the analysis of data collected within academic settings is reported, with the aim of demonstrating that attention must be concentrated within all educational, training, scholastic levels.