This paper describes and evaluates a university-wide extracurricular ‘Certificate of Global Competence’ introduced at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2016 as a means to strengthen engineering education with content seen as both very important and hard to fit into existing programmes. Engineering graduates are expected to have the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes to work effectively and ethically in environments characterised by cultural and social diversity. Going from these demands to educational programmes that integrate the teaching of global competence in true CDIO fashion has, however, proven to be an overwhelming task for many universities. Consequently, most HE institutions seem satisfied with measuring internationalisation using superficial but easily quantifiable data such as the number of international students or the number of exchange students, and KTH is an example of this trend. Students are encouraged to prepare for a global labour market, but their engineering programmes are highly restrictive and leave little or no room for studies of subjects outside the perceived core competencies of their professions. International students at KTH are similarly forced to cope on their own, usually resulting in having them spend most of their free time with other international students. To address this problem, KTH decided to establish the ‘Certificate of Global Competence’ comprising two elective courses and one study period abroad. The main idea has been to give students the opportunity to equip themselves with essential knowledge, skills and attitudes to function well in intercultural contexts even though they may not be given enough freedom in their programmes. Acknowledging the increasing importance of global competency, we argue that these skills ought to be more saliently described among the desired attributes of graduating engineers in future versions of the CDIO Syllabus.
