Defining the Industrial and Engineering Management Professional Profile: a longitudinal study based on job advertisements

Abstract

The engineering professional profiles have been discussed by several branches of the engineering field. On the one hand, this discussion helps to understand the professional practice and contributes to the specification of the competences that are suitable for each function and company culture. On the other hand, it is an essential starting point for the definition of curricula in engineering schools. Thus, this study aims to characterize, in an innovative way based on job advertisements, the demand for competences and areas of practice for Industrial Engineering and Management contributing for the definition of a professional profile. This characterization is based on the analysis of 1391 job advertisements, collected during seven years from a Portuguese newspaper. The data analysis takes into account the job description in which two categories were considered: areas of professional practice (e.g. project management) and transversal competences (e.g. teamwork). Considering the total number of job advertisements, it was possible to identify 1,962 cumulative references for 11 professional practice areas and 5,261 cumulative references for transversal competences. The contribution of this study lies on the identification of the main areas of practice and the main transversal competences demanded by employers.

Industry 4.0 - “Employee 4.0” in the Light of Teaching and Learning

“…PBL can define the general approach to environmental design which will be friendly for active learning. The efficiency of this approach as to the development of transversal skills (Lima et al, 2017;2015;2014;van Hattum-Janssen and Mesquita, 2011) is also very important. While facing the results of the conducted survey among students and entrepreneurs under the project co-implemented by the authors, this method allows for creating such a curriculum in the course of engineering studies which will satisfy the needs of both sides in the process of the implementation of the assumptions of Industry 4.0 (Cuzzuol et al, 2018) The second solution is the 'LOVE' method which is used in the teaching practices at a Thai university (Hussadintorn Na Ayutthaya and Koomsap, 2017).…”

Production engineers profiling: competences of the professional the market wants

“…In addition, both associations do not separate competences between soft skills and hard skills, also known as transversal skills and technical skills (Santos et al, 2017;Lima et al, 2017). This view is important as these competences are developed in different ways.…”

“…Finally, as seen in the literature review (Passow 2012;Graduate Management Admission Council, 2017;Santos et al, 2017;Lima et al, 2017), the relevance of soft skills are highlighted. Although the most important competence is "Problem Solving", the other competences in the importance ranking are soft skills, such as ii) Low priority -low importance, low performance: are minor weaknesses and do not require additional effort and, iv) Possible overkill -low importance, high performance: indicate that business resources committed to these attributes would be overkill and should be deployed elsewhere.…”

Identifying key criteria in development of Industrial Engineering education

“…communication and language) [2]; ICT and software skills [14,15]; managing innovation skills [13,22,24] Quality assurance and accreditation Benchmarking of accreditation and quality assurance systems [8,25,26]; certifying and adapting QMS [26,27] …”