Intervention to enhance PsyCap in em courses

ABSTRACT

The unprecedented challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the value of personal resources, such as optimism and resilience, that equip people to successfully adapt to stress and uncertainty. Within higher education, this suggests that employability skills should incorporate personal resource development, in addition to occupational skill/knowledge acquisition and professional network expansion. This paper outlines a framework for developing students' personal resources of hope, self-efficacy, resilience, and optimism (i.e., psychological capital). The framework can be easily embedded within the engineering curriculum and implemented in both face-to-face and online delivery modes. The framework aims to improve students' personal resources, immediately impacting their academic performance, engagement, and satisfaction in the short-term. In the long-term, it aims to provide students with key employability skills linked to individual and organisational success in their future career. We provide guidelines on how to embed such a framework into an electromagnetics engineering course. © 2021 IEEE.