Background: The development of employability skills is a concern of educational institutions, which must introduce experiential learning scenarios for undergraduate students. Purpose: This study is aimed at testing the relationship between emotional intelligence and individual task performance in teams, during a recruiting activity for an experiential learning program. Methodology/Approach: Self-reported and third rater’s measures were used to assess both variables as part of the selection process of participants on an experiential learning program focused on engineering competitions. Exploratory structural equation modeling was used for data analysis. Findings/Conclusions: Results show partial support of the hypothesis by revealing a significant but apparently counterintuitive relationship. Implications: The study reveals the measurement of employability skills as a challenge and a necessity. For employers, it reinforces that teamwork, socialization, and daily organizational endeavors require the appropriate soft skills to obtain good performance levels.

Many structural elements are exposed to conditions of load that are difficult to consider during the design stage, such as environment uncertainties, random impacts, overloads and inherent material idealization amongst others, hence, miss-estimating its life-time cycle. One way to test those designs is to construct a representative full-scale specimen and test it under the most critical load conditions in a controlled laboratory. Herein, we present a case of study of the fatigue test performed over a bolster beam redesigned in Universidad EAFIT belonging to a railway vehicle. The test was composed by three stages, each one testing a different load hypothesis. The bolster beam was instrumented at the most critical locations, following the results of a FEM analysis previously computed. As results, the most critical welds were identified and the total damage computed for an equivalent operation of eighteen-years, and also the behaviour of the specimen in presence of extreme longitudinal loads.

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Usability is a fundamental quality characteristic for the success of an interactive system. It is a concept that includes a set of metrics and methods in order to obtain easy-to-learn and easy-to-use systems. Usability Evaluation Methods, UEM, are quite diverse; their application depends on variables such as costs, time availability, and human resources. A large number of UEM can be employed to assess interactive software systems, but questions arise when deciding which method and/or combination of methods gives more (relevant) information. We propose Collaborative Usability Evaluation Methods, CUEM, following the principles defined by the Collaboration Engineering. This paper analyzes a set of CUEM conducted on different interactive software systems. It proposes combinations of CUEM that provide more complete and comprehensive information about the usability of interactive software systems than those evaluation methods conducted independently.

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