Industry vs universities : re-engineering graduate skills - a case study

Students' learning outcomes show that graduates from university courses are lacking in important skills, such as communication, decision-making, problem solving, leadership, emotional intelligence, social ethics as well the ability to work with people from different backgrounds. Engineering graduates today need to work within multicultural and multinational workplace environments with adequate professional attributes or competencies. The missing links between engineering graduate attributes and employers' expectations are elaborated in the paper. This paper describes if engineering graduates of Monash meet industry expectations in terms of the attributes that bring along after graduations. The paper also proposes a model to address shortfalls of expectations.