and her Ph.D. in Food Process Engineering from the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University. She is a member of Purdue's Teaching Academy. Since 1999, she has been a faculty member within the First-Year Engineering Program, teaching and guiding the design of one of the required first-year engineering courses that engages students in open-ended problem solving and design. Her research focuses on the development, implementation, and assessment of modeling and design activities with authentic engineering contexts. She also focuses on the implementation of standards-based grading and teaching assistant training.

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Essential competencies have been identified for engineers working in industry. These competencies include (but are not limited to) critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, and communication. Engineering education research has shown however, that engineering undergraduate students often fail to develop these crucial competencies. Industry has also noted that recent graduates exhibit competency gaps. To address these gaps, it is important for higher education institutions to seek to understand the competencies identified as necessary in industry. Moreover, one could argue educational institutions should develop and assess students' competencies based on these professional demands.This research systematically reviews literature related to this topic. This review seeks to answer two questions: 1) What are the competencies engineering students must have to be successful in the world of practice? 2) How can engineering education help students to develop these competencies? A total of 30 articles were identified as relevant and reviewed. Two themes were applied: 1) Identification of engineering competencies 2) Approaches to address competency shortfalls. Review of the literature suggests that while educational institutions are mostly aligned with engineering competencies hailed as important to ABET, there is still room to improve. The most frequent competencies mentioned in the literature include communication skills, teamwork, and problem-solving skills. Results suggest developing a continuous improvement mindset will encourage both educators and their institutions to include stakeholders such as industry into account as they systematically assess and review their graduating engineering students and undergraduate programs. Further, to date there does not appear to be a single accepted approach or best practice for incorporating targeted competencies into engineering curricula.

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Susan M. Lord received a B.S. from Cornell University in Materials Science and Electrical Engineering (EE) and the M.S. and Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University. She is currently Professor and Chair of Integrated Engineering at the University of San Diego. Her research focuses on the study and promotion of diversity in engineering including student pathways and inclusive teaching. She is Co-Director of the National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI). Her research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Lord is among the first to study Latinos in engineering and coauthored The Borderlands of Education: Latinas in Engineering. Dr. Lord is a Fellow of the IEEE and ASEE and is active in the engineering education community including serving as General Co-Chair of the Frontiers in Education Conference, President of the IEEE Education Society, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Education (ToE) and the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE). She and her coauthors received the 2011 Wickenden Award for the best paper in JEE and the 2011 and 2015 Best Paper Awards for the IEEE ToE. In Spring 2012, Dr. Lord spent a sabbatical at Southeast University in Nanjing, China teaching and doing research. She is on the USD team implementing "Developing Changemaking Engineers", an NSF-sponsored Revolutionizing Engineering Education (RED) project. Dr. Lord is the 2018 recipient of the IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award.