Analysis of the Educational Needs Related to, and Perceptions of the Importance of, Essential Job Competencies among Science and Engineering Graduates

Abstract

The goal of this study was to identify perceptions of the importance and needs of the essential job competencies required by Korean science and engineering graduates in the context of actual workplaces. We analyzed data from the 11th Youth Panel using the paired t-test, the Borich needs assessment, and the locus for focus model. An important finding was that the science and engineering graduates recognized the competencies pertaining to working with others and professional competencies as important among 15 essential competencies. We also found that they prioritized competencies differently depending on specific departments: the science graduates prioritized professional competencies, but the engineering graduates placed relatively greater importance on the competencies relating to interacting with others. Through this study, we identified the educational needs for essential job competencies from the science and engineering graduates and suggested implications for corresponding educational approaches.

Exploring medical educators’ readiness and the priority of their educational needs for online teaching

“…The participants’ characteristics and perceptions of the ability as well as the importance of online teaching competencies were analyzed using descriptive statistics. In addition, their educational needs were analyzed using paired t-tests, the Borich Needs Assessment, and the Locus for Focus model, which are the three typical steps used to analyze educational needs [ 10 ]. The paired t-tests were conducted to screen if there were significant differences between the two perceptions.…”

“…Their online teaching readiness will be explored by faculty members' perception of the importance and ability of online teaching competencies. It also aims to identify the online teaching competencies with the highest priority of educational needs using both Borich Needs Assessment [7] and the Locus for Focus model [10]. The findings from this study will provide important implications for medical educators who assess At the spring semester of 2020, the university decided to conduct online classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Training New Professionals in Service Engineering: Towards a Transdisciplinary Curriculum for Sustainable Businesses

“…In order to nurture human resources who can adapt to different changes across the economic and social landscape, the field of education should not only focus on imparting knowledge related to specific majors but also enable students to understand and adapt to the demands of a rapidly changing society [22].…”

“…"Educators should also help students develop competencies that will enable them to comprehensively analyze and resolve the diverse problems of such a society" [22] (p. 1). Putting the Service Engineering Curriculum into practice has, therefore, been a great challenge.…”

English Program Service Quality and Student Satisfaction at a Southern Chinese University

“…Each quadrant combines the importance and performance assigned by the client/user to the service element. The respective mean value of self-reported raw importance and attribute performance data will be the point for the IPA matrix (Martilla & James, 1977;Pike, 2004;Lim et al, 2020). The four quadrants in importance-performance analysis suggest four different marketing strategies and are characterized as follows (Martilla & James, 1977): Quadrant A represents high importance and low performance; this is the area of significant weaknesses that management needs to concentrate on and requires immediate attention for improvement.…”