Competencies of Engineering Graduates: What are the Employer’s Expectations?

Abstract

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.

Human resources development as an element of sustainable HRM – with the focus on production engineers

“…The lists of competencies expected from industrial engineers are also presented in the subject literature ( Santandreu-Mascarell et al., 2011 ; Najwa Azmi et al., 2018 ; Pais-Montes et al., 2019 ). It is believed that the Industry 3.0 engineer is a logical, analytical, and systematic person who follows the appropriate procedures and has an innate need to perform tasks properly and to focus on issues rather than people.…”

Aspectos históricos del teorema fundamental del cálculo y posibles mediaciones tecnológicas

“…Tal panorama demanda el desarrollo de nuevas competencias didácticas en el profesorado. Es así como los formadores no deben ser únicamente transmisores de conocimientos, sino además, deben orientar y ayudar a construir procesos que permitan aprender a aprender y aprender a emprender, es decir, enseñar a comprender e interpretar, transformando la información en conocimientos, así como potenciar la creatividad y la resolución de problemas (Najwa et al, 2018;Capote et al, 2016).…”

Productive Method as the Basis for Soft Skills Development in Engineering Foreign Language Education

“…Nowadays, there is a high demand for engineering personnel who obtain not only hard skills, which are theoretical knowledge and practical skills related to a specialty of a person, but also soft skills consisting of communication skills, creative thinking, analytical and managerial skills, and interpersonal skills and qualities. An issue of developing such skills in future engineers arises urgently, as a lot of scientists highlight the relevance of soft skills development according to plenty of surveys studying employers' requirements for employees [1][2][3][4]. However, sometimes there is a gap between the employers' requirements presented in their job advertisements and really demanded skills, as well as a huge variety of soft skills components proposed by scientists and lack of focus on development of soft skills within higher education.…”

“…However, sometimes there is a gap between the employers' requirements presented in their job advertisements and really demanded skills, as well as a huge variety of soft skills components proposed by scientists and lack of focus on development of soft skills within higher education. For example, scientists reveal how much training at the university contributed to the formation of these skills and come to the following conclusions: discrepancy between the significance of soft skills for graduates and their formation is more than 10%; activities carried out by the university to adapt and socialize the personality of students contributed to the formation of only basic communication skills; only 10% of the study time in universities is devoted to the development of soft skills [2,[5][6][7].…”

“…As long as most scientists consider communication skills and creative thinking basic components of soft skills [2,[8][9][10][11][12], engineering foreign language education can allow teachers to develop students' soft skills with the use of communicative and interactive tasks, which can be implemented within a productive method of teaching a foreign language. The productive method is the method of teaching the foreign language that involves usage of various interactive teaching technologies, electronic educational resources and is aimed at advancing not only foreign language communicative competence, but also interpersonal skills and personal qualities of engineering students [13], which are also components of soft skills.…”