The Need For Interdisciplinarity: A Case On Employees’ Perspectives

The issue of interdisciplinarity contains disparate nodes of knowledge and practices, including a wealth of information concerning the potential and value of interdisciplinary work. In the context of companies that handle large-scale and complex tasks, interdisciplinarity takes on a real-life role since its presence and importance is readily observable and, as this paper shows, a conscious, deliberate, and highly valued aspect of innovation in companies. Academic literature on the issue of interdisciplinarity asserts that engineers in the future need a wealth of competences, including ability to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams. Aalborg University in Denmark has experimented with interdisciplinarity in various PBL contexts; the guiding research problem of this paper concerns how work practices call for interdisciplinary competence development. Through this perspective, we gain insight into how interdisciplinary competences are relevant for students at AAU as a competence that must be proactively developed. The data set consists of nine interviews collected from a large Danish company. The interviews have been transcribed using Nvivo and coded according to the research problem. As the results of the qualitative data indicates, interdisciplinarity is not just an important competence for employees, but also a prerequisite for problem solving. Results indicate that interdisciplinarity is a competence that students must develop because interdisciplinarity is actively used for problem-solving in the types of jobs that engineering graduates will get in the future.