From University to Work: Alumni Viewpoints

Alumni studies are often overlooked in engineering education research, despite holding great potential for improving engineering programmes and creating the links that are missed when it comes to university-workplace transitions. Besides better understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the taught and learnt curriculum, being aware of the perspectives of the alumni contributes to identifying the array of knowledge, skills and attitudes graduates need for successful job integration. In exploring the Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) framework, there is a question: "[w]hat are the full set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that engineering students should possess as they leave the university, and at what level of proficiency?” (Crawley et al., 2007:45). In this study, we intended to ask the same question. This paper presents the results of a part of an alumni survey which focuses on the skills they gained and the strengths and needs of the degrees they obtained. In the results, we noticed that more than 80% of respondents are highly satisfied with skills in the research domain, such as using maths, information skills, and research skills, while the less convincing are project management and teamwork. Skills related to sustainability, ethics and entrepreneurship, were identified as definite weaknesses. We experimented with the CDIO framework analyse the open-ended answers, where the most mentioned professional skills were real-life content and interdisciplinarity, while autonomy was the most frequent personal skill missing. Although the results indicate a lingering difficulty in developing a comprehensive and holistic curriculum in engineering education, there are a number of lessons we can draw from it both in terms of further efforts in developing academic offers and in terms of alumni-oriented research in fields of engineering education.