A competency-based model to integrate sustainability in curricula in French universities and engineering schools

Several reports indicate that it is now necessary to modify our consumption patterns (food and manufacturing products, energy, etc.) and production to reduce our negative impacts on the planet. Companies have already evolved with sometimes varied motivations (strategy of greening their image, compliance with regulations or opportunity for innovation) but to support these developments one of the main axes to achieve this objective is education and training. Acting on business strategies and more practically from product design by making engineers take the notion of sustainability into account in their decisions is a crucial issue. To do this, they must master the knowledge and skills to modify and reduce our impact on the environment and have a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of our society. Such a context obliges to integrate non-technical competencies in curricula and a disciplinary trainings. In this paper, we present a competency-based model to support university and teams of teachers in creating such curricula and courses. We provide some guidelines and examples of activities to help teachers to identify which type of skill mix is addressed at different levels of acquisition.