An essential aspect of higher education institutions’ academic curricula for engineering courses is the students’ industrial internship programs. In the literature, it is well accepted that such programs provide valuable learning outcomes and increase the graduates’ employment prospects. Thus, it is paramount to evaluate the internship programs’ quality to identify opportunities to improve their design and implementation. However, that evaluation typically depends on self-designed academic assessment surveys of questionable validity. The purpose of this paper is to assess engineering students’ perceptions of their internship experiences. For that purpose, the validation of a recently adapted version of the Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ) was carried out on a sample of 447 engineering students that participated in industrial internship programs offered by Portuguese public universities and polytechnic schools. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to confirm the suitability of the model proposed by the WEQ’s authors on this study’s sample. The psychometric qualities were evaluated through convergent and discriminant validity. The results showed that the model fit the sample well, and convergent and discriminant validity was established. The general competencies subscale was the most important for the participants—specifically, the competency of solving problems. Differences concerning the WEQ and gender, company size, and compensation were found and discussed. This study provides researchers in the field with a new tool validated explicitly for engineering students.

The concept of cultural intelligence has been the object of increasing attention from the scientific community due to its importance in a globalized world. To fulfil their mission, higher education institutions need individuals capable of effectively interacting with others who come from different cultural backgrounds. This study analyzes the level of cultural intelligence and its background in a Portuguese engineering higher education institution. This study used a cultural intelligence scale and applied it to a sample of 445 participants. The results show that individuals in this Portuguese institution have an interesting level of awareness of others’ cultural preferences. However, particular attention should be paid to improving the outcome of the cognitive dimension. The results show the potential of international experiences and activities that foster cultural exposure. Consequently, the managers of institutions should make efforts to promote Erasmus programs or similar internships abroad. In addition, they should promote activities that foster multicultural contact, whether extracurricular activities or multicultural clubs or associations, meetings, lectures or classes with appropriate pedagogical methodologies, for example, experiential or collaborative teaching.

The Kolb model is widely used to analyze the learning style of engineering students; however, there are no published studies carried out in Portugal. This study was applied to students who had just began there courses at a Portuguese engineering school. This study object is to assess whether there is a clearly majority learning style; whether there are differences in the learning style among all students and between students in the industrial management course and those in the technological engineering courses. The results allow the pedagogical practice improvement in the classroom regarding the effectiveness increase of the teaching process. This study results also allow improving the way students approach the study, overcoming difficulties in understanding the topics studied, improving the construction of their skills and increasing the quality of the learning process.

European Mobility Programmes promoted by the European Commission have propelled a significant change in students’ mobility across Europe in the last few decades. The European Project Semester (EPS) is one of those programmes. Research has mainly focused on understanding the factors that shape students’ decision to engage in mobility experiences but has not tackled the motivation(s) leading them to opt for that programme in a particular country at a specific institution. This paper aims to understand EPS students’ motivation to elect this programme for their mobility at a particular country/city/institution and hence contribute to help institutions define policies and practices to attract more students to this specific programme. Carried out at the Polytechnic School of Engineering in Porto, a mixed research methodology was followed, considering qualitative and quantitative data equally, and a theoretical framework was devised based on the push–pull factors model. Seventy-seven students participated in the study by filling in a closed-question questionnaire and engaging in focus group sessions. The findings sustained previous research and highlighted that students’ motivation is supported by a combination of factors (personal, professional, academic), among which the personal category was the highest rated. These results show that the motivations for choosing the EPS programme do not differ considerably from those leading students to undertake regular mobility.

The increasing flexibility and rapid, profound changes in the labor market require employability skills from graduates, dem1anding greater attention from higher education institutions to training opportunities that foster the development of these skills among their students. Using a sample of 373 first-year engineering students, this study analyzed, through regression analysis, the impact of sociodemographic (gender, age), academic (work, program choice, average grade), and psychological (life satisfaction, perseverance of effort, consistency of interests) variables on students’ confidence in achieving their professional career project after completing their degree. The results indicate that women and younger students show lower levels of confidence in achieving their future vocational projects, as do students with lower academic performance and those with less consistency in their interests. These findings suggest the need for specialized support services for students, starting from the first year, in career development provided by higher education institutions.

This study aims to assess whether students’ learning styles have changed due to the environmental context changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. This analysis is important because learning styles, in addition to predicting vocational outcomes, must inform the design of pedagogical practices and supports used in the teaching environment. To achieve this objective, a cross-sectional analysis was conducted on three cohorts of students who enrolled in an engineering course. Students in group 2 have been under confinement conditions during the previous year, while students in group 3 have been under confinement conditions for the previous two years. Group 1 consists of students who did not experience any confinement. The obtained results lead to the following conclusions: (i) The pandemic outbreak has led to environmental changes, pedagogical practices, and changes in the personality profiles of students, which can significantly impact the learning styles of students entering an engineering degree. (ii) While some learning styles are more susceptible to change, others remain resilient. (iii) The duration of exposure to the environmental changes caused by the pandemic outbreak has a greater impact on the changes in these learning styles.