Competencies for designing resilient systems in engineering education – a content analysis of selected study programs of five European technical universities

Climate change increases the risk of natural disasters, which requires the design of sustainable and resilient infrastructure. This implies a need to enable engineering students to deal with highly complex problems and uncertainty. These competencies refer to the concept of resilience, describing the ability of a system to adapt to threatening events and to learn from failure. In this study, we investigated if and if so, how far resilience-related competencies are addressed within engineering study programs. Based on a content analysis, the learning outcomes from 48 study programs of five leading technical universities in Europe were analysed. The results indicate a lack of both resilience-related competencies within engineering programs and a consistent implementation of learning outcomes within the European Higher Education Area. Accordingly, future engineering professionals need to be more extensively educated to design resilient systems and higher education institutions need to purposefully embed these abilities in their study programs.