2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There is a high demand to increase job readiness in the semiconductor/microsystems manufacturing area, especially for graduate students (MS/PhD) as they are expected to add value to the company much sooner than undergraduates which require longer onboarding. This difference in onboarding time causes the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA’s) to be significantly different between undergraduates and graduate students. Current engineering graduate academic education is focused on enhancing research experience such as technical writing, experimentation, and research methodology, however it does not fully prepare students for industrial work experience. Currently, the primary method for students to obtain work experience is via internship, but this is not always possible due to location and time constraints, citizenship status, academic research requirements, and limited positions available. Therefore, graduate students often struggle with transitioning from an academic setting (research oriented) to an industry environment, because students and most faculty have limited industrial work experience.

The first step to overcoming this challenge is to identify key KSA’s that graduate students are expected to have upon starting a job in the semiconducting/microsystems manufacturing area. Since this complex multidisciplinary area of manufacturing is constantly evolving KSA’s are likely to have changed over the past decade, however our pedagogical methods to teaching the subjects have not changed. To identify the KSA’s desired upon graduation we conducted a survey (n=47 previous identified KSA’s) with both industry members and engineering faculty members. KSA topics included essential skills, technical skills, fabrication skills, design knowledge, statistics, emerging skills, and management. Industrial panel members consisted of a diverse range of engineers working in the semiconductor/microsystem manufacturing area from junior and senior process engineers to managers, and members were from multinational companies and small start-up companies. Engineering faculty are active researchers who graduated MS/PhD working in semiconducting area within the past five years.

The survey allowed the industry panel to state what KSA’s were important and what KSA’s they thought Universities already do a good job of teaching to graduate students. The results demonstrate that the industry panel identified 40.4% of the KSA’s that were mentioned as important and currently lacking in recent graduate student hires. The survey illustrated that 59.6% of potential KSA’s were deemed either not critically necessary or new employees already had these skills, meaning universities already do a sufficient job of teaching these KSA’s to students. However, engineering faculty said 58.33% of the KSA’s were needed and not currently taught. This shows a strong discrepancy between what Professors think industry members need and what industry members consider necessary. One example is faculty thought students lacked essential skills whereas the industry panel was satisfied with current essential skills from graduate students. Another example is statistical analysis where industry members highlighted a strong need, but faculty thought students had these skills. The results of this study will be beneficial to faculty in developing new pedagogical methods to better prepare students for transitioning from academia to the semiconductor industry and demonstrate a strong need for industrial opinion when designing curriculum.