Recognizing and Supporting a Scholarship of Practice: Soft Skills are Hard!

Modern professional practice requires not only recognized 'technical' skills, but also high-level generic or 'soft' professional skills. Recent professional negligence claims suggest that technically well-qualified professionals with deficiencies in these generic skills may fail to effectively identify and satisfy client requirements, contributing to the professional indemnity insurance (PII) crisis which has developed in the last few years. In 2003, the Federal, State and Territory attorneys agreed to introduce legislation to address the PII crisis. The NSW Professional Standards Council (PSC) now has national responsibility for reviewing current continuing professional development (CPD) programs and improving their effectiveness. As a first step, the PSC commissioned a discussion paper, followed by a forum reviewing its findings. In this paper we review the PSC paper and forum, with a focus on their relevance to engineering education. We explore four central areas for action that we believe need to be addressed by engineering educators: integration of CPD with undergraduate programs; attention to broad ethical and futures issues, including sustainability; clarification of the nomenclature describing these skills; and the importance of internships to the development of generic competencies. We also challenge two widely held assumptions about professional practice. The first is that the generic skills essential to successful professional practice can be readily acquired after graduation through professional induction and CPD programs. The second is that these 'soft' practice skills are somehow less demanding and less academically challenging than the 'technical' skills which are the almost exclusive content of most professional qualifications, including those in engineering. We argue that the investigation of generic professional practice skills and their development is a critically important area of scholarship that must be incorporated into engineering research and teaching (Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education, 2005, 6(1), 1 - 6).