Abstract
The primary responsibility of the engineering faculty is to prepare skilled engineers for the local industry. In addition to imparting engineering knowledge, universities play an essential and critical role in the formation and refinement of the personality of an engineer. This includes interpersonal social skills, especially since industrial engineers (IEs) are likely to interact with people more often as compared to the other engineering fields. Recent studies and theories have emerged, showing that Social Intelligence (SQ) of students includes multiple skills or competency areas. Here, we asked IE students to complete questionnaires rating their own SQ across those competency areas. We showed that the three competency areas with the lowest scores are those that are perhaps most important for the workplace: teamwork, dispute resolution, and social flexibility. We also found that these three competency areas are related to one another, but not to other social competency areas. We finished by investigating particular skills within each competency area where IE students show the most difficulty. This work provides a theoretical study to increase the social intelligence of IE students in terms of appearance, importance, and skills necessary to raise social intelligence. In practice, this study is intended to benefit IE students to employ their social intelligence, as well as the development of creativity and achievement through staff practices such as training workshops and seminars explaining the skills of social intelligence and methods for their development among students.