Bibliometric Review of Professional Skills Development in Engineering Education: Implications for Engineering Management Programs

Engineering managers benefit from having professional skills in areas such as communication, teamwork, decision-making, project management, ethical awareness, and an appreciation of contemporary issues. These skills complement the technical engineering foundation in relevant areas of science and mathematics combined with a solid grounding in engineering analysis, design and practice. However, there are continuing challenges in regard to understanding the optimal approaches for integrating professional skills and knowledge development in engineering management programs and more broadly across engineering education. Therefore, this study conducted a bibliometric review on professional skills development in engineering education. The method is based on systematic searching of the extant literature, which identified 88 documents according to keyword retrieval over a 5 year period from 2018 to 2022. The documents are categorized in terms of publication metrics (such as publication year, subject area and country of origin) followed by bibliometric analysis to determine co-occurrence of keywords, co-occurrence of text, and co-authorship in terms of countries. The study includes content analysis of the 10 publications having the highest citation count. This analysis allowed emerging trends on the publications to be identified as well as collaboration patterns, research strategies, and structure of the knowledge base. The study concludes with a set of implications for engineering management programs arising from the bibliometric review.