Keeping up with the latest hardware and software is absolutely necessary for engineers, but it’s far from all they need to keep their high-tech careers on track.
According to a survey of employers conducted by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in Dearborn, Mich., recent engineering graduates start their careers with all the hard technical expertise they need, but fall short in “soft” skills such as interpersonal communications, team-building and presentation development.
The study, the first phase of a five-year Manufacturing Education Plan created by the association, was designed to identify “competency gaps” or missing aspects of technical training anticipated by employers. The results caught the organization by surprise, said Michael D. Wright, career development and lifelong learning specialist for the group.
SME project director for education and development.
“We were a little surprised that our survey of six technical fields in manufacturing didn’t focus on technical skills,” he explains. “Instead, five of the six industry groups focused on non-technical areas–skills that many engineers may feel are not essential.”
The five groups highlighted communication training, including presentation skills, report generation, graphic computer use, team-building, listening and meeting organization and facilitation, as missing from recent graduates.
Several of the survey groups also pointed to personal and attitude weaknesses among their high-tech employees, including a lack of leadership skills, sensitivity to others, awareness of enterprise goals and ability to teach and learn from colleagues.
“Employers indicated that there was a high correlation between these business skills and professional success and positive career development,” Wright said. “Engineers who have learned these skills or who can learn these skills throughout their career–as well as maintain technical competency–are likely to be the most successful.”
The survey also pointed out the need for “lifelong learning,” a process of ongoing job and professional training that encourages engineers to adopt new personal and professional skills as well as technological knowledge, Wright said.
Lifelong learning has become the new watchword among high-tech employers and is replacing an older notion of continuing education which focused only on technical job skills. The new philosophy is beginning to drive a new generation of educational programs that foster the combination of skills, not just job training, he notes.
SME announced a second phase of its education plan late last year to seed development of educational programs that will help manufacturing professionals improve career competencies with lifelong learning. The SME Education Foundation has allocated $3 million for grants to community colleges and universities for pilot programs that would eventually become permanent and self-supporting.
“In the past, the academic community has contributed to the education of engineers strictly through technical training. From what we have learned in our Phase I study, the manufacturing engineers of the future will need many more skills,” said SME executive director Philip Trimble. “We hope to encourage the development of a curriculum that will help manufacturing employees to learn those skills on a continuing basis.
“Study after study has reported on what many people feel is wrong with engineering education and made recommendations. The problem was that most of these recommendations were voluntary and not supported by funded programs and employers.”
The Manufacturing Education Plan is sponsored by several leading manufacturing companies, including Boeing Co. in Seattle, Caterpillar Inc. in Peoria, Motorola Inc. in Schaumburg and 3M in Minneapolis.
Robert W. Galvin, chairman of the executive committee at Motorola, was the keynote speaker at the SME’s Manufacturing Education Congress in June, which assembled industry representatives for discussion.
Galvin called for an overhaul of university training for engineers to include an accelerated, broader curriculum that would get them into the work force faster, where they would be expected to continue learning on the job and grow into management positions faster.
“If teaching methods are re-examined, it can be shown that anything can be taught in half the time it traditionally takes,” he said. Business skills, including leadership, quality, creativity and ethics, should be part of every class, he added.
Within Motorola, lifelong learning is already part of a corporate culture that emphasizes professional development for all employees. Employees plan and budget for a minimum of 40 hours of offsite training each year and most employees exceed the minimum, said Ken Zdunek, vice president of technology and manager of research. Supervisors include training schedules for their employees as part of their own job assessment.
“Technology is evolving so fast that we can no longer limit training to just updating employees on the new developments. Employees must participate in learning as an ongoing process to meet their employer’s expectation of their skills and to meet their personal career expectations,” he said.
Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago works with several local high-tech employers, including Motorola and Lucent Technologies, to develop professional education programs that teach technology and job skills identified by the companies, said Ruth Z. Sweetser, assistant dean for business and industry liaison at the school’s Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice campus in Wheaton.
The university offers more than 35 graduate-degree programs in science and engineering and 25 professional certificate programs in specialized topics.
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