Proposal of a Self-Assessment Competency Framework for Transdisciplinary Engineering

Abstract

Transdisciplinary (TD) working is claimed to be critical to meet future societal needs, with engineers being at the core to provide solutions to these challenges. However, there is little available that enables one to assess whether they or their team have the competencies required. Within this paper, we propose a self-assessment framework to ascertain whether design engineers have the competencies which enable TD working. We describe how the competencies were identified using a systematic literature review (SLR), we then describe how we utilized coded decision trees to classify which disciplinary level a particular competency can enable. In total, 76 competencies were classified; the results of the analysis show 20 of these displaying TD attributes as defined by Jantsch. The novelty of the approach is as follows: (1) In this paper, we propose a novel way to map the identified competencies against the levels of Jantsch’s hierarchical framework. (2) The proposed framework enables self-assessment of individual or team competencies to assess whether they have the competencies which enable TD working. (3) It enables a move towards incorporating TD practices in engineering projects.