Courses for teaching leadership capacity in professional engineering degrees in Australia and Europe

Recently, many educational institutions across the globe have implemented engineering leadership programmes either as a part of a formal engineering curriculum or where leadership development is embedded into separate in-house programmes. This shows the clear intent of these educational institutions to prepare their engineering students for solving real-world problems, recognising that both technical and leadership skills are valuable for tomorrow's engineers. Leadership programmes in engineering education have been implemented in various formats with varying degrees of success. It has already been identified in research studies that 80–90% of engineering leadership programmes offered explicitly across the globe were based in the United States of America. However, in Europe and Australia, there is a noticeable lack of engineering leadership programmes, particularly in undergraduate curricula. The programmes that are offered across Australia and Europe have distinct design and delivery styles but there are certain key features that are common to most of the programmes, including professional partnerships, mentoring, engineering design and project-based approaches.