Assessing teamwork for accreditation: Understanding what needs to be known and its integration into engineering and technology curricula

Most future engineering and technology graduates will work on complex projects in a team environment requiring multiple skill sets. These are critical skills that the future engineer must acquire to readily adapt to the global work environment. Assessing effective teamwork skills as part of the ABET process is very important. To effectively assess how teams work, categorization of skills and an understanding of why engineers and technologists must work in teams is a necessity. In addition, peculiarities, which might exist with teamwork in a technical setting and often differentiating from teamwork in other contexts, must be identified. With such a categorization, a skill set can be defined and used as a template for incorporation into engineering and technology curricula. This template will serve as a guide for understanding and assessing necessary teamwork skills. Key characteristics, such as time, complexity and knowledge limitations that generally require technical personnel to work as a team to complete a task will be enumerated and the nature of technical teamwork defined. This can be used to define the capabilities an engineer needs to be an effective working team member. These capabilities have associated skill sets that translate in the various knowledge bases that can be incorporated into engineering curricula and become a template for assessing teamwork in an engineering program.