Using the Results from Needs Analysis Surveys to Boost Student Engineers' Language and Communication Skills

This workshop explores how findings from needs analysis surveys can enhance the teaching of discipline-specific language and communication skills for engineering students. The workshop draws on insights from two surveys. The first survey, conducted in 2015, has informed the development of a framework of engineering communication skills and a catalogue of teaching and learning activities. The second survey is currently underway and aims to respond to new demands placed on engineers in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Through interactive activities, workshop participants will examine key survey results, map the communication needs highlighted in the surveys to practical teaching approaches, and design a teaching and learning activity relevant to their disciplinary context. The session explicitly engages with SEFI's (2025) position paper on the evolving skillsets of engineers, encouraging participants to reflect on how engineering communication is changing in response to social, technological, and educational shifts. By linking needs analysis to pedagogical design, the workshop aims to encourage both teachers and managers (including both language and communication specialists and engineering specialists) to respond proactively to the growing emphasis on transferable and transdisciplinary skills in engineering education and to recognise the opportunities related to teaching and learning discipline-specific literacy skills to engineers throughout their studies.