Does the Revision of ABET Student Outcomes Include the Competencies Required to Succeed in Start-Ups and Entrepreneurial Companies?“.

Abstract

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) recently revised the student outcomes of Criterion 3. Researchers have already share their concerns about how this revision would decouple the acquisition of technical knowledge from the development of certain professional skills. From their perspective, this might affect engineering graduates’ capacity to compete in an increasingly global labor market, which currently includes startups and entrepreneurial companies. To explore what competencies ABET’s revision could have overlooked, we interviewed entrepreneurship stakeholders about the most important abilities engineers need. By entrepreneurship stakeholders, we mean entrepreneurship instructors, researchers on entrepreneurship education, and leaders from startup accelerators and business incubators in Chile, Colombia, the U.S., Spain and the U.K. Interviewees distinguished between competencies engineers demonstrate to master and others that they must reinforce. They also differentiated skill structures of startup founders and joiners. Recommendations were made for ABET’s student outcomes consideration. Future work implies the application of a quantitative questionnaire to discuss national and international implications.