Cross-Disciplinary Skills

Competency is expertise that individuals can demonstrate in professional, educational, social, or other life contexts. Competencies include content knowledge, skills, and dispositions.

Some of the most important skills are cross-disciplinary [1, 2, 3]. These are abilities valued across different domains that may be performed within a specific disciplinary context. For example, collaboration skills are crucial for working on interdisciplinary teams. Likewise, strong verbal communication skills are required to discuss technical matters with a variety of audiences, and visual communication skills are important not only to create diagrams for colleagues in the same field, but also to communicate complex ideas to those who are not experts.

You can review our research-based list of cross-disciplinary skills for computing professionals. Students in engineering, engineering technology, and other professional programs will benefit from the same skills, though the specifics of how they are demonstrated may be task- and context-specific. Integrating cross-disciplinary skills in an authentic way into technical coursework, in addition to traditional “gen ed” requirements, will make them more likely to transfer across courses and into the workplace [4, 5].

How are cross-disciplinary skills taught and assessed?

Cross-disciplinary skills can be fostered through a variety of pedagogical techniques, most of which allow them to be integrated within disciplinary projects or tasks.  Some include:

• Instructor modeling of the application of skills and explaining their thought process.
• Experiential learning, such as in realistic team projects.
• Creation of authentic materials (such as a report aimed at upper management, or a guide aimed at users).
• Engagement with case studies.

As with all skills, we recommend:

• Fading scaffolding to transition from a high-level of instructor support to independent work.
• Multiple opportunities for practice and receiving helpful feedback.
• Application of skill in multiple contexts to promote transfer of learning across settings.
• Make sure to explicitly develop cross-disciplinary skills through a variety of activities and types of tasks within and across courses. A spiral model is ideal for planning for cross-disciplinary skill development.

Cross-disciplinary skills can also be assessed in a variety of ways, including:

• Observations of the student applying the skill.
• Review of artifacts, such as project reports, presentations, papers, photos/videos of events.
• Review of logs, rationale, reflections, etc.
• Peer-review of artifacts, self-assessments, self-and-peer review of team members’ interactions.

Rubrics can be used in each case to provide quick feedback and for grading.

Open Educational Resource repository

• Take a look at our OER repository for materials and activities you could adapt in your own classroom to foster and assess cross-disciplinary skills. 
• Many of the Pedagogical Strategies and Practices (PSPs) will be applicable to fostering cross-disciplinary skills.

[1] Hart Research Associates. (2018, July). Fulfilling the American dream: Liberal education and the future of work. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from https://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/LEAP/2018EmployerResearchReport.pdf 

[2] World Economic Forum. (2025, January 7). The Future of Jobs Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full 

[3] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (n.d.). Skills for 2030. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/about/projects/edu/education-2040/concept-notes/Skills_for_2030_concept_note.pdf 

[4] Bass, R., & Moore, J. L. (Eds.). (2018). Understanding writing transfer : implications for transformative student learning in higher education (1st ed.). Stylus Publishing, LLC. doi:/10.4324/9781003448518 

[5] Klausen, S. H. (2014). Transfer and Cohesion in Interdisciplinary Education. Nordidactica, (1), 1–20. Retrieved from https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-33324