Global Competence: Components

Engineering-Specific Competence

Engineering specific competence refers to cultural influences on engineering practices. It helps engineers in one culture understand how products are modified to be accepted and useful in another culture. An example of this may be the size of vehicle in one culture over another. Five aspects to this component are:

1. Cross-cultural Engineering Attitudes: This is a personal attitude when someone appreciates, respects, and values the engineering practices and contributions of another culture.
2. Cross-cultural Engineering Interaction: This includes the ability to successfully interact with engineers (or engineering students) from another culture.
3. Cultural Engineering Practices: This specifies the engineering practices and approaches one culture may use that differs from another culture. For example one culture may quickly pick an engineering design and work with it through to completion trying to solve any problems with the design as they arise. This would be in opposition to another culture that brainstorms as many ideas as possible, runs several tests on these ideas and then picks the idea that works or fits the best.
4. Global Engineering Occupations: This is the ability to describe the cultural and business context surrounding occupations in global engineering.
5. Culture-Centered Product Design: A student has an understanding of how culture influences product design. He/she allows for modifying engineering designs to allow a product to fit a specific culture or several cultures.