**1. Introduction**

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, promoted by, what is known in the occidental world as Industry4.0, will put some challenges to the new engineers, as alerted by the report of the National Academy of Science and Engineering [1]. It is envisioned that the way work will be

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organized in the future will enable the release of workers doing routine tasks, appealing to their skills for more creative and value-added activities. Additionally, they will be called to develop more complex products and systems and to manage them efficiently through new methods, tools and technologies [e.g., by using, among others, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), cyber-physical systems (CPS)] and to use transdisciplinary perspectives [2].

Work organization and design changes will imply a total new role of workers, increasing their responsibility and enhancing their personal development. According to the report of the American Management Association [3], the skills to deal with the fast pace of change in businesses are beyond the traditional "Three Rs" of reading, writing and arithmetic to a new set of skills, the "Four Cs": Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration and Creativity, to enable workers to think critically, solve problems, innovate, collaborate and communicate more effectively.

The changes described require a new thinking about the way prospective workers are trained. This implies modifications in teaching institutions and pedagogical approaches. These modifications must educate the future workers to have more initiative, to possess excellent communication skills and the ability to organize their own work, as recommended by the reports referred above [1, 3] and others [4]. These needed skills fit in the set of the called Social Skills that according to the Business dictionary is the *"Ability to communicate, persuade, and interact with other members of the society, without undue conflict or disharmony"* [5]. Other definitions found are aligned with the one presented above, such as the definition of the Collins dictionary that states: *"the skills that are necessary in order to communicate and interact with others"* [6].

Active learning methodologies are particularly advocated, such as project-based learning (PBL), as methodologies capable of providing such skills [7–9]. Project-based learning is an active learning methodology that engages the students on their own learning, and puts them at the heart of competence development, including technical and transversal ones, like social skills. Indeed, PBL requires that team members ultimately bond with their peers in a student-centered approach, aiming at the development of technical proficiency in a number of subjects, for proposing a meaningful solution for an open-ended challenge. This prolific process requires that team members abandon their passive attitude toward learning and allows them to systematically exercise a number of distinct settings, which enrich their learning experiences. These are key in engineering programs where students are ought to develop competences for future practice, such as solving real-life problems, making convincing arguments (oral and written), leading teams, managing conflicts, working effectively within teams, considering social and environmental issues, interacting with others (e.g., colleagues, partners, clients) and being proactive and innovative.

This chapter discusses the PBL implemented in the Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) program of first year since 2004–2005 as an effective tool to promote the defined social skills in the freshman. The instruments used to evidence this were the PBL process assessment survey applied in the end of semester to the first-year students and some interviews with the graduates PBL participants.

This chapter is divided into six sections. After the introduction, a brief literature review about PBL and skills is presented in Section 2. The research methodology is introduced in Section 3. Section 4 presents the context study describing the most important aspects of PBL. Section 5 points out the results and main findings and, finally, last section outlines some conclusions.
