Skills Gap and Interdisciplinary Curriculum - Students' Perspective

摘要

To successfully enter the workforce, young graduates need a specific skillset. However, there is a gap between these skills and the actual set of skills young graduates obtain from their university experience. In this paper we present the European students' perspective on the issue of the skills gap between the current higher education STEM curricula and company expectations. A possible solution to the skills gap issue is the creation of joint programmes, in which universities and companies cooperate in order to establish a curriculum that is adequate to the needs of all stakeholders. One of the main positives about joint programmes is the variety of teaching methods, which is seen as something that leads to more open-minded graduates with a wider perspective on the engineering profession. The combination of technical and socio-economic subjects into a single degree is one of the ways to solve the skills gap. Interdisciplinary competence does not only arise from practical experience but should also be an integral part of any educational system. We conclude that all stakeholders involved in education have to strive for better synergy when it comes to shaping the curricula of engineering programmes.