Conducting Comparative Reviews of Transferable Competencies and Skills Instruction across Institutions 

Analysing how different programmes and institutions instruct transferable competencies and skills can provide educators, researchers, educational developers, and administrators with valuable models to inform their practice or programme. Yet despite their value, relatively few of these reviews are found in the literature. This chapter examines different approaches to conduct a comparative review, including literature and document reviews, surveys, interviews, and engaging with scholarly communities, and shares advantages and disadvantages of each. We consider the challenges of conducting a comparative review through a case study of our own project to understand communication instruction in engineering education in Canada. Throughout this chapter we emphasize the relationship between purpose, method, design, and scope, and argue that a review is most successful when the researcher is adaptable and persistent. We recommend that as a community we focus efforts on facilitating scholarly conversations about transferable competencies and skills instruction, consistently mapping, archiving, and disseminating our work, as less frequent engagement complicates the review process.