María Itriago Camejo’s scientific contributions

This paper summarizes the results of a project assigned to this team by the Deans of Engineering Council of the National Council of Universities and presented to the Planning Office for Higher Education. The project aims are: to define the term �competence� related to the functions an engineer will perform in his working responsibilities after graduation; to generate a group of basic competences and validate them with a sample of faculty members, postgraduate students and working professionals of engineering enterprises in Venezuela, and to correlate the validated competences with the essentials contents for the curriculum of an undergraduate engineering program. The methodology used to perform this task was based on the through search of bibliographic and documental materials, from which competences were generated for the basic undergraduate studies, applicable to all engineering curricula. This proposal was validated by applying a survey to the former mentioned audiences and the information was processed to obtain a functional competences map. As a result, a curricular structure is proposed, which includes vertical and transversal contents for the curriculum, designed to guaranty the undergraduate student will achieve the desired competences to be able to perform successfully in a working environment. This work constitutes an exclusive contribution to the modernization of the engineering curriculum in Venezuela, because it associates the basic and primary functions of an engineering graduate with the traditional curricular components of the Engineering programs in Venezuela.