Abstract: The competency cultivation during the critical transitional period (first-year) is the core link in the through-training of top innovative talents. Therefore, the Guangzhou International Campus of South China University of Technology (SCUT) has implemented engineering experience education for first-year students. By creating a learning environment composed of scaffolding and real problem situations, students participate in the learning process of team collaboration, hands-on practice, and creating tangible works. The empirical analysis results show that engineering experience education can effectively enhance students’ professional development motivation, engineering practical foundational abilities, and deep learning abilities, forming a chain development pattern from professional development motivation to engineering practical foundational abilities and then to deep learning abilities. Among them, learning participation has a direct positive impact on in-depth abilities, and the learning environment mainly indirectly empowers the development of in-depth abilities by stimulating the professional development motivation. This engineering experience education with its experiential feature as a prominent characteristic, breaks through the dilemma of traditional engineering education and the bottleneck of high-level ability training in first-year engineering education through chain ability progression, providing practical references for the competency cultivation of top innovative talents during the critical transitional period.