How do engineering students become ready for the industry? This question is in the minds of students, educational institutions and the companies which recruit fresh engineers. This has to be viewed in the context of what are the jobs for which the engineers are being prepared, what skills are required for those jobs and how to develop those skills in engineering students.
With the rapid changes in technology, and the disruption in the job market due to AI, it is becoming very difficult to decide what are the jobs that engineering students of today will be doing in the next few years. Thus the students have to ready for jobs that are not known.
I had delivered a couple of sessions to Engineering students and faculty using the below framework. This framework groups the skills into Employability skills and professional skills (in this case Engineering skills). While the changes in technology and AI disruption can influence the professional skills, the employability skills are common across all jobs and hence quite stable.
At the core of the framework is the value system. Values are established at a societal level, then family level as well as corporate level. Finally, each individual based on their background stands for few values. For example, ‘Integrity’ is a value which is expected of every engineer. I have grouped the skills into ‘Employability Skills’ and ‘Professional Skills’. The employability skills are common across professions and a published report (Gibb, J. (2004). Generic Skills in Vocational Education and Training: Research Readings. National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER)) gives a comprehensive list of employability skills. They are Communication, Teamwork, Problem Solving, Initiative & Enterprise, Planning & Organizing and Learning skills. The professional required for engineers is the engineering skills. This is composed of Theory, its Practice and Economy (operating in a constrained environment), coupled with Best Practices and Tools. In this there is a industry vertical specific or Domain specific element which is referred to as Industry in the framework. With exposure to working in a certain industry vertical or a domain, an engineer develops industry/domain specific skills.
Dr. Selvaraj Vadivelu 