2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

One of the challenges for new engineering graduates is to find the dream job, and one of the challenges for industry is to find the right engineer to hire. Graduates will have to apply for many companies hoping to get interviews that will give them an opportunity to sell their skills and get the job. On the other hand, companies will have to interview many candidates hoping that they will get the right candidate to offer him/her the job. This is a tedious, time consuming, and costly process for both the industry and the new graduates. Many efforts are done by universities to offer certain general specialties to meet the industry needs. However, changes in universities curriculums are constrained by the curriculum requirements for the offered degrees. Also, curriculum changes are long processes, and by the time the changes are implemented, the industry needs may have already shifted. -Universities are educating students to have a solid skill set and inspire them to be life-long learners, and the companies can provide the training on the job for their new employees to further develop their skill sets.
The authors of this paper propose building a skill portal with all three stakeholders in mind: Students (future engineers), Industry (potential employers), and Academia (educators of the potential engineers to be employed by industry or other sectors). The skill portal will allow the industry (company) to enter their desired skills via a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and save it into a database; allow students to view needed skills per different companies, and the university will design programs and activities (certification programs, in particular, given its flexibility and the potential to integrate it with some courses) to prepare students with the needed skills for certain industry needs. A pilot program is now running to solicit needed skill from the industrial partners of our university, and to encourage the students in a class to pursue a certificate, with both pieces of information to be shared among all the relevant parties. The pilot program will be used to evaluate this program’s impact on shortening the time for the students to get the right job after graduation, and the time for the companies to hire the right employee.