Development of Professional Competencies in the CSED Curriculum at UKM

The engineering education today has been shift towards to prepare the engineers in meeting the needs of both public sector and private industry. They want the engineers to be technically skilful and also to be competent in a variety of professional practices that includes a variety of skills and outcomes i.e. communication, ethics, leadership, economics and creativity in order to be able to compete effectively in the global economy and many professional practice challenges. Civil and Structural Engineering Department (CSED) at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) has integrated professional practices into the curriculum to strengthen the students’ technical knowledge and simultaneously become skilful communicators, team leaders, ethical engineers, creative thinkers, decision makers and problem solvers. In this paper, the experience of CSED, UKM in integrating the professional practices into the civil engineering courses throughout the four years programme is presented.