Recently, universities keep receiving complaints from the industries regarding the capability of engineering graduates when starting their new job. The complaints were always about the inability of the engineering graduates to adapt in the industry. This is due to minimum exposure of industrial training period given by university to them. As a result, most of fresh engineering graduates do not have enough industry experience that is demanded by industry. Worse case, there is mismatching skill during industrial training which not relevance to what they are studied before. This problem contributes to unemployment issue among engineering fresh graduates. The purpose of this paper is to review and analyse about the engineering competencies from all over the world. The paper is written on extensive secondary data analysis. It is revealed that the criteria needed by employers from most developed countries are almost similar. Based on summary, technical and non-technical skills are both important to become a competent engineer. There are some recommendations to develop and improve both technical and non-technical skills that can be emphasized by authorities of higher education especially in Malaysia.

Signature is one of human biometrics that may change due to some factors, for example age, mood and environment, which means two signatures from a person cannot perfectly matching each other. A Signature Verification System (SVS) is a solution for such situation. The system can be decomposed into three stages: data acquisition and preprocessing, feature extraction and verification. This paper presents techniques for SVS that uses Freeman chain code (FCC) as data representation. Before extracting the features, the raw images will undergo preprocessing stage; binarization, noise removal, cropping and thinning. In the first part of feature extraction stage, the FCC was extracted by using boundary-based style on the largest contiguous part of the signature images. The extracted FCC was divided into four, eight or sixteen equal parts. In the second part of feature extraction, six global features were calculated against split image to test the feature efficiency. Finally, verification utilized Euclidean distance to measured and matched in k-Nearest Neighbors. MCYT bimodal database was used in every stage in the system. Based on the experimental results, the lowest error rate for FRR and FAR were 6.67 % and 12.44 % with AER 9.85 % which is better in term of performance compared to other works using that same database.

Electrical and electronics is one of the sectors that have led in the process of moving to Industry 4.0 and an important contributor in Malaysia’s economy as it is one of the twelve National Key Economic Area (NKEA) in the country’s Economic Transformation Program (ETP). Globalization era needs human capital resources with competency, competitive and multi-skilled to lead a country to be a developed country. Malaysia is one of developing country in the world that is facing the unemployment issue among engineering graduates. The delayed of education transformation will affect the graduates’ skills developments which can lead to unemployment among them because the demands of today’s industries cannot be met. Many employers admit that our engineering graduates lack in non-technical skills, but they seem fine in technical skills. Industrial training is a platform for students to develop nontechnical skills in the real workplace which difficult to be learned in the classroom. All bachelor's engineering students need to undergo industrial training for at least 8 weeks as stated in Engineering Accreditation Council (EAC) manual. This paper presents the issues arise and resolutions done by faculty in minimizing the issues. A qualitative study has been done to twelve industrial training coordinators in 8 public and private universities to find the experts' opinions. Many issues have been highlighted with resolutions to minimize the issues. This is very important to assure students can gain valuable industrial training by effectively developing their non-technical skills to meet the industries demands.

Many complaints come from employers regarding on non-technical skills among engineering graduates. Non-technical skills can be effectively developed during industrial training while they are still undergraduates. This paper is presenting the perspective of employers on factors that are developing the non-technical skills during industrial training. A qualitative study was done by interviewing five employers from electrical and electronics industries to gain the data. Thematic analysis was done after transcripting the interview protocols. The result shows that employers nowadays really need communication skills, critical thinking and problem-solving skills in an engineer. In addition, teamwork skills, lifelong learning, ethics and computing skills are the skills that are mentioned by the interviewed employers. In term of factor affecting students' non-technical skills during industrial training, they are two opinions for the first factor which is placement. Three out of five employers agreed the relevant industry to the course is crucial, but the rest disagreed. The reasons of disagreement are because the development of non-technical skills should base on the task given and the student's motivation in learning. All employers are agreed with six months duration, regular assessment, task given must be relevant with projects and presentation, and the learning outcomes must be revised regularly.

Due to the existence of Vocational Colleges (KV), the teachers' teaching criteria in KV have also undergone a change. Not only teachers need to have theoretical knowledge only, but teachers need to have high set of skills in doing practical work. It is therefore a priority for these future teachers to master and remember what they have learned in the university because they are able to help them when they want to convey to students in KV later. Therefore, lecturers need to use appropriate approaches to ensure that students understand a lesson, so they can remember easily and longer namely using Project Based Learning (PjBL). Hence, the main objective of this study is to look into the impact of PJBL in improving the retention of knowledge and skills of students who are also the future teachers in KV. The sample of this study consisted of two groups of fourth year students who attended the Education and Technology (Mechanical Engineering) courses. This study used quasi experimental study design in which the Pretest-Posttest design was used to look at the effects of PjBL in term of memory retention period of the students. Fully qualitative method was used in which the students in both group were observed and interviewed in order to gain additional findings. The findings show that the students in the experimental group were having improved knowledge and skills retention as 81.8% obtained score above 80 in the Posttest, whereas only 14.3% of the students in the control group obtained score above 80. The findings also showed that the main factor that improved their knowledge and skills retention was the requirement for the students to use problem solving skills during the project works. Thus, PjBL is a suitable learning method to improve the knowledge and skills retentions for the students.

Industrial Revolution 4.0 has been one of the most popular topics discussed among engineers. In the near future the non-technical skills will be equally or more important than technical skills. Moreover, IR4.0 will incur job displacement and majority of the task will be taken over by robots and Artificial Intelligent (Tapsir, S.H. and Puteh, M., 2018. Framing Malaysian Higher Education 4.0). Therefore, priority will be given to non-technical skills which cannot be done completely by the robots and Artificial Intelligent at the moment. NACE Job Outlook 2019 (To, F., et al., 2019. Job Outlook 2019, (November 2018)) shows Problem Solving Skills is the second most important skill sought by employers; Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC), 8-Disciplinary and Plan- Do-Check-Act (PDCA) are the very common systematic approaches used by the industries to solve the problem arose in the industrial environment. The studies show that the problems cannot be solved by using the same kind of thinking approach applied at the moment it was created. Therefore, a systematic analytical skill is required to handle the engineering related problems happening at manufacturing environment or engineering workplace. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the existing literature about Problem Solving skills for graduate engineers through a systematic literature review. This paper analyses literature through electronic databases mainly from Scopus and Web of Science. This paper summarizes types of problem-solving skills applied in the engineering field as of now. Based on that, engineers can differentiate and understand the approach of the problemsolving skills in the industrial environment to improve the failures and increase productivity.

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