The focus of this study is the emergence of distinctive graduate attributes in flagship programmes at Universities of Technology in South Africa. The theoretical framework chosen for this study, Legitimation Code Theory (Maton 2014), offers an explanation of the underlying knowledge principles that make different kinds of thinking, doing and being possible. This article studies how favourable graduate attributes were achieved, identifies similarities across underpinning structures, and highlights the challenges faced by universities of technology in creating environments in which desired graduate attributes might be developed. The article offers a means of understanding the potential for the emergence of graduate attributes across undergraduate programmes in vocational and professional higher education contexts.

Company’s work, growth and development are facilitated by the synergy between employee education and working. However, fresh employees who recently graduated from higher education institutions are often mismatched to their jobs due to their imbalances between skills offered or, in other words, education, and skills needed or, in other words, practice in the world of work. For bridging the gap between graduates’ skills and company’s needs, technical universities traditionally devote much time to students’ practical training. The aim of the present paper is to analyse scientific literature on practice based approach underpinning empirical study of needs of teaching staff within PEESA III Project for incorporation of practice based approach into engineering education at master level in South Africa. The data was collected through focus group interview at Cape Peninsula University of Technology in May 2019. The findings of the present research are that university teachers’ experience in practice based approach at universities in South Africa has to be enriched. The following research question has been formulated: How to organize a teacher professional development within teacher training for effective incorporation of practice based approach into engineering education at master level in South Africa? Directions of further research are formulated.

The PEESA II project promotes the exchange between German and Southern Africa's students in order to increase the number of highly qualified experts in the field of renewable energies and the quality of curricula developed in the previous PEESA project. However, the

Re-curriculation is currently the most talked about topic in Higher Education in South Africa because of the new Higher Education Qualification Sub-Framework alignment process required by all Higher Education Institutions. However, the lecturer in the classroom, especially new lecturers, are also faced with the task of designing the actual curricula of a subject once the new qualification is to be implemented, in terms of achieving the aims and objectives of the subject area. In other words, ensuring that the outcomes of the subject are achieved by the student. Ideally all lecturers at institutions of higher learning should develop strategies for their “own” curricula. Developing the aforementioned strategies might be challenging to first time lecturers. The methodologies of developing a new qualification and strategies for building curricula is discussed in this paper are different curriculum planning methods and strategies. The aforementioned strategies are focusing on students, mentoring, supportive tools such as software programmes, feedback and assessments. The findings of this paper are proper curricula development to enhance the ability to understand, recall and apply information. The main objective is to use proper curricula development to empower students with a diversity of cultures to understand the material presented by the lecturer. This paper concludes that curricula planning should allow students to be given space to grow and interact and ultimately attain deep life-long learning.