Leadership Program
Lead beyond the classroom. Build the skills, confidence and mindset to shape the future of engineering.
As an engineering student, you’re developing the technical skills to become an engineer. But are you building the leadership skills needed for the future?
Today’s engineers need more than technical expertise. They must communicate confidently, collaborate effectively, navigate complex challenges, and create solutions with real impact.
The Engineering Leadership Program which will run from 24th September to 5th November 2026, is designed to help you build the professional and leadership capabilities needed for the future of engineering and life beyond university. Through industry insights, interactive learning, and practical experiences, you’ll explore leadership in modern engineering while developing skills that support your studies, internships, graduate roles, and beyond.
Program overview
-
- Week 2: Thursday 24 September, 5pm – 8pm // Welcome Event which will explore leadership, employability, and the future of engineering.
- Week 3: Thursday 1 October, 3pm – 4pm // Engineering Problem Leadership Webinar*.
- Week 4: Wednesday 7 October, 3pm – 4pm // Leadership for Societal Impact Webinar*.
- Week 5: Thursday 15th October, 6pm – 8pm // Industry Leadership Panel featuring engineering professionals sharing career insights.
- Week 6: Wednesday 21 October, 3pm – 4pm // Engineering Communication and Influence Webinar*.
- Week 8: Thursday 5th November, 5pm – 7pm // A Closing Event on celebrating your growth and achievements with industry recruiters.
*All webinars will be recorded and available to watch in your own time. Following each webinar, you will need to complete a module to help you apply your learning. Each module will take approximately 30 minutes to complete.
-
The program runs from 24 September to 5 November and requires approximately 11.5 hours in total.
To successfully complete the program, students must:
- Attend at least two events
- Watch three leadership webinars
- Complete all three leadership modules and achieve at least 90% for each module
-
Upon satisfactorily meeting the program requirements, you will be awarded a completion certificate and a LinkedIn digital badge and banner to acknowledge your involvement in this program. We will also provide you with access to the Engineering Leadership Program LinkedIn Group to continue your professional and personal development.
Modules
-
Academic Advsior: May Lim
This module explores what it means to communicate effectively as an engineer, going well beyond language to encompass listening, audience awareness, and cultural sensitivity. Students learn that communication spans the entire engineering lifecycle, from engaging stakeholders and asking the right questions, to navigating team dynamics, managing conflict, and pitching solutions with appropriate caveats. The module bridges into leadership by covering how to advocate for ideas, influence decision-making, and develop situational awareness about when to step forward and when to step back.
Learning outcomes:
- Understand that effective communication is a two-way process requiring active listening, genuine audience understanding, and cultural competency.
- Apply stakeholder engagement techniques, including background research, purposeful questioning, and professional documentation practices.
- Recognise the leadership communication skills that matter most in engineering contexts, including influencing, self-advocacy, and knowing when to lead and when to defer.
-
Academic Advisor: Dr. Bernard Kornfeld
This module invites engineering students to look beyond technical outputs and consider the broader human context of their work, through the lens of "socio-technical" thinking. Drawing on real-world examples like designing dialysis equipment for remote Indigenous communities, students explore how empathy, contextual awareness, and a sense of purpose can be the difference between engineering that delivers a technical result and engineering that genuinely changes lives. The module is intentionally reflective and mindset-focused, helping students ask better questions about the impact they want to have and the kind of leader they might become.
Learning outcomes:
- Explain the concept of socio-technical thinking and articulate how engineering solutions exist within complex social, cultural, and human systems.
- Recognise how empathy and contextual awareness shape engineering decisions, and describe what it looks like in practice through real-world examples.
- Reflect on a societal challenge they feel personally invested in, and consider what it means to take individual ownership in addressing it.
-
Academic Advisor: Dr. Sarah Grundy
This module reframes problems not as obstacles but as the core business of engineering, helping students build both competence and confidence in tackling ambiguous, open-ended challenges. Students are introduced to a systematic problem-solving method covering how to define the goal, assess the current state, identify the gap, generate and evaluate options, and clearly communicate the chosen solution, in a way that applies to virtually any situation in study, industry, or life. A central insight is that confidence in decision-making is built not by waiting for certainty, but by understanding your assumptions, knowing your constraints, and having the courage to act on incomplete data.
Learning outcomes:
- Apply a systematic, step-by-step engineering problem-solving framework to both technical challenges and the open-ended, real-world problems that characterise professional practice.
- Distinguish between textbook problems with clear right-or-wrong answers and the ambiguous, multi-stakeholder problems engineers actually face in industry.
- Build decision-making confidence by learning to identify assumptions, evaluate risks, and communicate a well-reasoned solution even when data is incomplete.