Identifying and prioritizing the components of professional competency in industrial engineering based on the moral ethics of engineering using the fuzzy Delphi approach

Advancement of jobs towards professionalism, doubles the importance of encountering with moral conflicts and adopting decisions which are in accordance with the engineering ethics. Observing the mentioned ethics becomes possible by determining the factors of professional competency and then observing them. Thus, the current research aims to identify and prioritize the components of professional competence on the basis of engineering ethics using the fuzzy Delphi approach combined with the exploratory mixed method. At the first stage, professional competencies of engineering, in the form of 14 components, were extracted from the literature of related research and 9 codes in the area of engineering ethics. Professional competencies of industrial engineering were identified by the analysis of content and interviewing 15 experts from the industrial engineering community. The fuzzy Delphi approach has been used in order to reach a group consensus among the experts. The findings have demonstrated that “safety, society’s well-being, sustainable management of resources, responsibility, rendering services in accordance with one’s level of competence, avoiding the conflict of interests, neutrality and honesty, justice, experience, maintaining and developing the level of knowledge and skill, having a cognizance of technology, tendency to learning and nurturance, improving the status of engineering profession, being respectful to people’s personalities, and supporting the professional councils”, have consecutively the highest priority. The results of this research have been effective in framing the moral ethics codes of industrial engineers.