An Engineering Research Postgraduate Program with a Professional and Global Outlook

Transferable skills, also classified as generic skills or professional skills, have been the focus of the new postgraduate education trend worldwide. The new trend emphasizes students’ employability and highlights that education should infuse students with global perspectives and interdisciplinary development, in addition to the traditional thinking that focuses on students’ research competencies within the area of specialization. Following the new trend, the School of Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology revamped the research postgraduate curriculum by introducing the Professional Development Course and the requirement of taking postgraduate- level courses from other disciplines such as science, business and management, and humanities and social science. The new curriculum aims at enhancing students’ transferable skills in such areas as communication, entrepreneurship, and research ethics and also encouraging students’ interdisciplinary interaction. The course content is customized to meet students’ engineering-specific and research-specific learning needs. The Centre for Engineering Education Innovation within the school takes the responsibility of assessing student learning outcomes through education research to ensure the quality and improvement of the new curriculum. Accompanying the new curriculum is the university’s new supporting infrastructure, the key component of which is the common area where research postgraduate students are exposed to a variety of professional activities and interdisciplinary intellectual events in diverse forms.