Being a modern electrical engineer does not only require state of the art skills in areas such as transfer and processing of information, electronics, systems engineering, and biomedical electrical engineering; it also requires generic engineering skills such as oral and written communication, team building, interpersonal skills, and the ability to take the responsibility of solving assigned tasks. In the development of a new electrical engineering curriculum, it was considered a challenge to introduce these generic engineering skills in a more applicable way. The approach described in this paper has been very successful in implementing and maintaining a challenging first year project based engineering course with a high level of training of generic engineering skills. (Contains 5 figures.)