Perception of the Importance of Professional Communication among Civil Engineering Students

Abstract

This paper aims to find out the attitudes and perceptions of civil engineering students about the importance of professional communication and their current and future competencies. In addition, this work aims to investigate their interest in courses on communication skills. For this research, a quantitative research method was used - an online survey. The research sample consists of 109 students of all years of undergraduate and graduate studies in Civil Engineering at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture, and Geodesy in Split. The work is based on three hypotheses that were tested with non-parametric statistical tests after the research was carried out. The results of the research rejected the first hypothesis that students of higher years of civil engineering studies consider professional communication skills more important for work in industry compared to students of lower years of studies. Furthermore, this research determined that there is a statistically significant correlation between the ratings of the importance of professional communication among civil engineering students and the ratings of their communication skills and that there is a statistically significant correlation between civil engineering students who show a preference for communication skills and interest in attending courses in the field of communication.

Keywords

• professional communication skills
• communication in civil engineering
• communication in engineering
• civil engineering students
• communication education