Employability Skill Development Needs of Engineering Students and Employers' Feedback on Their Internship Performance

Abstract

The study explored on the development needs of engineering students on employability skills and its relationship with their internship performance evaluation from the head of the company or department. The study utilized a quantitative descriptive type of research with 125 total engineering graduates from an academic institution in the Philippines. Results of the study showed that engineering students have excellent internship performance evaluation rating with regard to attitude, personality, knowledge and skills. They have identified the System Thinking Skill with very high development need, assessment on employability skills along with critical thinking and interpersonal skill. Meanwhile, they considered literacy and numeracy as well as work ethics and management skills as they have already developed. Test of relationship showed that skill development needs in terms of literacy and numeracy, management skill and work ethics have significant negative correlation to the four aspects of internship performance evaluation while positive relationship exists between skill development needs in terms of critical thinking and system thinking skills and the internship performance.

Embracing the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Effectiveness of Work Integrated Learning

“…The thematic analysis indicates that nearly all the students involved in the WIL program acquired learning and developed their skills. This is true for similar studies conducted on WIL and its impact on students across disciplines globally [4,30,32,51,36,57]. As noted earlier, the 4IR has been associated with technological disruptions, transformative changes to the business sector and all aspects of humanity.…”

“…This is to enable the HEI to build such skills into the curriculum/module content. The non-alignment of curriculum to labour market requirements poses challenges such as skills/workplace mis-match, inability to match soft and hard skills, less quality/competent university graduates, etcetera [30,32]. Similarly, the alignment of the education system to the labour market demands would go a long way in addressing these challenges [53,54]…”

Enabling the Systems Engineering Education Ecosystem (SEEE)

“…The structures of courses, degree programs, and post-secondary institution departmental divisions are based on reductionist approaches first used in industrial corporate organizations at that time. While the existing educational organizations and strategies have been sufficient for the industrial age in which desired occupational capabilities and supporting educational objectives are changing slowly over time, they are not sufficient in today's rapidly evolving, networked, digitally transformed environment (Shah, 2015;Staniškis, 2016;Laguador, 2020).…”

How fourth industrial revolution skillsets mediate the relationship between work integrated learning, graduate employability, and future job

“…The emergence of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) amidst unemployment challenges and grim, facing graduates in securing a life-long career, is one of the major academic discourses in recent times. Before the 4IR, higher education providers with government institutions have identified gaps in the educational system and found lack of or inadequate skills as the bane of graduate unemployment globally [1,2]. The fourth industrial revolution paradigm has altered learning and production systems due to the import of digitalization into industrial activities [3].…”

“…The task of training graduates in the diverse and technological-driven labour market has translated into a broad institutional approach to graduate employability [16,20]. Many studies have described the features of graduate employability to include the development of generic and professional skills and capabilities for work readiness, career self-management, and network learning [1,14]. The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) transforms all facets of human endeavour, bringing unprecedented transformation into society's socio-economic and political fabric [21].…”