Nowadays, intercultural competences and social skills are inevitable for a successful engineering career because they play a significant role in professional profiles of engineers and will do so even more in the future. Those competences can only be gathered through international exchange. Due to the progressing globalization companies do no longer operate only on local but on global markets. Thus, especially engineering should not be limited by national borders. Therefore students have to be prepared to face the challenges connected with globalized markets. Nevertheless, the number of students in engineering science who leave Germany to another country for the purpose of study or traineeship (referred to as "outbound mobility") is distinctly below average compared to other disciplines. Statistics show that the goals of the Bologna Reform, whose key aim was the unification of European higher education to boost international mobility by establishing a common credit transfer system, were not obtained satisfactorily. The reform focused on structural changes to increase student mobility throughout Europe as a central goal. On the Ministerial Conference 2009 in Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve the European Ministers of Education and Research set the aim that until 2020 20% of European students should have lived and worked abroad. On the Bologna conferences in Budapest and Vienna in 2010 it became clear that this goal will not be accomplished.
展开▼