EPICES or ‘European Platform for Innovation and Collaboration between Engineer Students’ is an Erasmus plus strategic partnership project (September 2014 –January 2017) co-funded by the EU. There are eight partners in this project: ISMEP-Supméca (France, coordinator), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), Aalto University (Finland), Riga Technical University (Latvia), Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (Italy), Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (Spain) and the European Society for Engineering Education – SEFI (Belgium). The purpose of EPICES is to develop a European collaboration on at-a-distance problem- and project-based learning (PBL) frameworks and methods. This paper presents the application of the case study method in engineering education using PBL. The case study is based on the implementation of EPICES sub-projects using authentic issues chosen by teachers or provided by the industrial partners. The study analyses the relevance of the different skills for engineering education. The project partners investigated and defined 29 main skills for engineering students that could be acquired during engineering courses. Faculty members (course leaders) evaluated how the study course contributed to acquiring each of these skills and set up a skill based assessment system. This study shows that the Methodological and Technical Skills are dominant for all courses. Project-based learning (“P” courses) and problem-based learning (“T” courses) have many similarities. The differences appear when a closer look is taken at the skills individually. There are 5 common skills among the 10 skills with the highest impact in both groups. At the same time, the top rated skill in the “P” courses only ranks 25th in the “T” courses; and vice-versa the top rated skill in “T” courses ranks 12th in the “P” courses. The excel-based assessment tool has been created to facilitate this case study and PBL assessment process in general. The tool helps teachers to evaluate the students’ learning results, to analyse acquired skills individually, to calculate the final grade of the course and to analyse the whole project group performance. Further research will focuses on the feedback of teachers and students on this method for assessing skills and the usability of the developed assessment tool.