What is the Engineering Management? Exploring the Emerging Knowledge and Skills for Engineers

This paper provides an overview on the emerging knowledge and skills needs that led to establish a degree program in Engineering Management. In the twentieth century the transformation and the innovation of industrial systems, services and educational institutions, as well as the acceleration of organizational and managerial processes in different industries, led to the need to train a new generation of engineers with strong skills in the field of managerial and economic phenomena. These organizational and structural changes in the industrial society conducted to the transformation of engineering education. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the set of knowledge and skills required for engineers: methodological knowledge base, technological skills, organizational and managerial skills, transversal skills. From the sixties to the present day, the relative weight of the technological skills (hardware skills) is reduced compared to the organizational and managerial skills (software skills) that have become very important over the years for the engineers which, more than other professionals, lie within the border between organization and technology.