Employer and Student Mismatch in Early-Career Skill Development

Alyson Eggleston; Robert Rabb; Ronald Welch

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Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: College Industry Partnerships Division Technical Session 2
Page Count: 16
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--40895
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/40895
Download Count: 390

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Paper Authors

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Alyson Eggleston The Citadel

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Dr. Alyson Eggleston is a cognitive linguist specializing in the impact our speech has on the way we think and solve problems. She is the founding Director of Technical Communication at The Citadel, and has developed a project-based technical communication course that serves over 14 STEM majors and several degree programs in the social sciences. She is also acting Residential Fellow for the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching, Learning, and Distance Education, and in this role regularly mentors faculty and facilitates workshops on instructional design, Quality Matters assessments, and novel edtech applications. She is also the acting liaison for the Office of Institutional Assessment and Accreditation, and creates online assessment resources and facilitates webinars and workshops to all levels of administration and faculty to demonstrate how to leverage assessment data in service to continuous programmatic improvement and resource acquisition. Her research interests include STEM communications pedagogy, cognitive empathy, industry-academia interaction, teaching and learning.

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Robert Rabb The Citadel

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Professor, Mechanical Engineering, The Citadel

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Ronald Welch The Citadel

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Ronald W. Welch, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, F.ASEE, F.SAME
Professor of Civil Engineering

Ron Welch received his B.S. degree in Engineering Mechanics from the United States Military Academy in 1982. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1990 and 1999, respectively. He was Dean of the School of Engineering at The Citadel from 1 July 2011- 30 June 2021. He is currently Professor of Civil Engineering at The Citadel after completing a sabbatical. Prior to his current position, he was the Department Head of Civil Engineering at The University of Texas at Tyler from Jan 2007 to June 2011 as well as served in the Army Corps of Engineers for over 24 years including eleven years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy where he retired as a Colonel.

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Abstract

Students, early-career engineers, and employers disagree on the relative importance of so-called ‘soft skills’ and communication in the context of internships and early hiring. This misunderstanding arises because students and companies misidentify each other’s value systems. Students seeking internships are hesitant to approach company recruiters, thinking the companies are looking for someone technically proficient in a particular field. Companies understand that students have not completed their undergraduate curriculum and lack technical knowledge. However, companies are seeking students to develop into prospective long-term employees and value students’ communication and professional skills over technical knowledge. Many industry partners of The Citadel specialize in proprietary products or support the nation’s defense. For this reason, employers have no expectation that students or recent graduates will have technical knowledge in a specific domain. However, employers search for students who can listen, take direction, and deliver results. Comparing a counterbalanced, Likert-scaled survey of engineering students attending career networking events and a survey targeting over 50 employers, we find significant perception gaps in communication and relative student performance and preparedness for networking events. Identifying perception gaps, or blind spots, ensure our engineering graduates matriculate with career-readiness. While students’ definitions of what constituted ‘professional skills’ were narrow, employers grouped nearly all tasking actions as communication-related or dependent on good communication. Similarly, students believed themselves to be well-prepared for networking events, and deemed their performance as adequate. Early-career engineers, too, underestimated the relative importance that employers attributed to communication skills, as well as the impact communication skills have on promotion and hiring decisions. These findings are well supported by employability research, where countries like Malaysia, India, and Japan have instituted educational policy initiatives to formalize industry partnerships as on-campus experiences. Identifying significant response differences with regard to the definition of professional skills, the importance of communication skills, and personal preparedness provides a unique dataset to guide continued curricular improvement throughout the engineering degree path. This report is part of a larger, mixed-methods study that seeks to close communication skill gaps in developing engineering students and create an ABET-informed approach to embedding communication skill scaffolding into a traditional 4-year engineering curriculum. Career Services and support personnel within the School of Engineering at The Citadel coordinated access to the industry partners that were surveyed.

Citation
Format

Eggleston, A., & Rabb, R., & Welch, R. (2022, August), Employer and Student Mismatch in Early-Career Skill Development Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--40895

TY - CPAPER
AB - Students, early-career engineers, and employers disagree on the relative importance of so-called ‘soft skills’ and communication in the context of internships and early hiring. This misunderstanding arises because students and companies misidentify each other’s value systems. Students seeking internships are hesitant to approach company recruiters, thinking the companies are looking for someone technically proficient in a particular field. Companies understand that students have not completed their undergraduate curriculum and lack technical knowledge. However, companies are seeking students to develop into prospective long-term employees and value students’ communication and professional skills over technical knowledge. Many industry partners of The Citadel specialize in proprietary products or support the nation’s defense. For this reason, employers have no expectation that students or recent graduates will have technical knowledge in a specific domain. However, employers search for students who can listen, take direction, and deliver results. Comparing a counterbalanced, Likert-scaled survey of engineering students attending career networking events and a survey targeting over 50 employers, we find significant perception gaps in communication and relative student performance and preparedness for networking events.
Identifying perception gaps, or blind spots, ensure our engineering graduates matriculate with career-readiness. While students’ definitions of what constituted ‘professional skills’ were narrow, employers grouped nearly all tasking actions as communication-related or dependent on good communication. Similarly, students believed themselves to be well-prepared for networking events, and deemed their performance as adequate. Early-career engineers, too, underestimated the relative importance that employers attributed to communication skills, as well as the impact communication skills have on promotion and hiring decisions. These findings are well supported by employability research, where countries like Malaysia, India, and Japan have instituted educational policy initiatives to formalize industry partnerships as on-campus experiences.
Identifying significant response differences with regard to the definition of professional skills, the importance of communication skills, and personal preparedness provides a unique dataset to guide continued curricular improvement throughout the engineering degree path. This report is part of a larger, mixed-methods study that seeks to close communication skill gaps in developing engineering students and create an ABET-informed approach to embedding communication skill scaffolding into a traditional 4-year engineering curriculum. Career Services and support personnel within the School of Engineering at The Citadel coordinated access to the industry partners that were surveyed.

AU - Alyson Eggleston
AU - Robert Rabb
AU - Ronald Welch
CY - Minneapolis, MN
DA - 2022/08/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Employer and Student Mismatch in Early-Career Skill Development
UR - https://peer.asee.org/40895
DO - 10.18260/1-2--40895
ER -