Aligning Engineering Education with Industrial Needs through Specialized Courses

Rapid progress in technology along with globalization have established new requirements for the skills that engineers should demonstrate in the workplace. The traditional academic program and the teaching-learning methods are outdated and do not equip students with important skills such as critical thinking, teamwork, lifelong learning, problem-solving, leadership, and entrepreneurship. In professional life, engineers work in heterogeneous and interdisciplinary teams. This work reports the results of engineering design courses provided at several Saudi engineering faculties. The course is a capstone oriented where interdisciplinary teams work to design a final product using the problem-solving process: Problem definition, solution generation, course of action decision, solution implementation, and solution evaluation.