What Engineers Learn Doesn’t Always Match What Employers Need

University faculty plan the courses offered to students using accreditor standards and their own perceptions of what expertise, abilities, and capabilities new graduates will need to be successful in their engineering careers. But what employers require of newly minted mechanical engineers isn’t always considered. “Engineering curricula are built around faculty and accreditors’ perceptions of what knowledge, skills, and abilities graduates will need in engineering careers,” reported Gabriella Coloyan Fleming, research scientist, Department of Engineering Education, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va., in the paper, “What engineering employers want: An analysis of technical and professional skills in engineering job advertisements,” published in the Journal of Engineering Education.

The research team of Fleming, Michelle Klopfer, Andrew Katz, and David Knight conclude that “skills and abilities are more important to engineering employers, as they more directly relate to what engineers do in their jobs on a daily basis and include both technical and professional skills. However, as engineering faculty largely have backgrounds in academia, their perceptions of what skills graduates need to be hirable for and successful in nonacademic careers may not be fully accurate.”

The study

Understanding that engineering education “has a long history of grappling with such alignment questions,” the team acknowledged “swings” throughout the history of the engineering curriculum. There has been criticism in the past that what university teaches are too “theoretical” or “more applied.” Based on this premise, “rather than asking whether the engineering curriculum aligns with specific workplace skills, as in this prior work, our current analysis follows an exploratory, data-driven approach enabled by data extraction and natural language processing techniques to interrogate the demand side of the conceptual framework,” the team declared. 

This method represents “an advance from prior work by enabling the consideration of thousands of existing job advertisements as well as the incorporation of other variables, such as disciplines, education levels, and listed salary levels.” Based on this premise, the team examined over 26,000 (26,103) job descriptions of which 19 percent (4,962) were directed toward mechanical engineering and found the frequencies of specific professional and technical skills of those ads seeking engineers holding bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees. The report not only revealed which professional and technical skills industry employer-sought, but using salary within the ads themselves, which offered a “premium” to those who can say they held them.  

Professional and technical skills

Starting during the pandemic, the research team decided to mine job ads with the idea that there possibly was “a gap between what schools do to prepare students and what engineers actually do in the engineering industry,” Fleming said. Her interest in the project stemmed from Fleming’s own job search experience as a mechanical engineering graduate. “I was considering technical engineering jobs in industry. And I felt that my Ph.D. program had not really prepared me for these jobs. There was a gap between the skills that I had and the skills that employers required. I’m hoping that this research can help future students not have the same experience I did.”

Sometimes called “soft skills,” researchers examined “professional skills” that are often the “deciding factor in many engineering hiring managers’ decisions” because employers decide that graduates from well-reputed programs “have satisfactory technical skills” and “job-specific technical skills can be learned on the job.” Twenty professional skills most relevant to engineering occupations were identified that ranged from “listening” and “writing,” to more complex skills as “problem solving.” Even though professional skills are very commonly listed in job advertisements, “students are only really indirectly taught them,” Fleming explained. 

Fleming explained, for example, that the word teamwork appears in 72 percent of mechanical engineering bachelor's level job ads, and the skill is not directly taught. She conceded that teaching professional skills can be difficult and often only small pockets of professors teach them, or even know how to teach them. Other professional skills are even more difficult to teach students, but employers are looking for new engineers to have the skill. For example, “problem solving” appears across ads for bachelor’s (63 percent), master’s (65 percent), and Ph.D.s (68 percent).

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Technical skills are those fundamental to the professional’s job need, such as knowledge of specific programming language or being able to use a certain type of software. When examining the gap between what is needed to work as a mechanical engineer it’s not always what is not covered in school, but instead, what is covered and not needed. Fleming gives the example of Matlab which universities stress. "But the knowledge of Matlab is really in a minority of job advertisements for mechanical engineers, just 3 percent of bachelor’s level jobs, 8 percent of master’s level, and 7 percent of Ph.D.-level jobs,” she reported. 

Skill premiums

But what is also a unique situation of the report is that skill—whether technical or professional—can be mentioned in a low number of ads but can offer those who hold the skill a way to earn top dollar for a knowledge that only a few graduates hold. So while the report highlighted which skills were most commonly sought from a frequency perspective, it also offered the “value proposition” of hiring a future employee with specific skills. To understand which skills are the most financially valued, the researchers introduced the concept of “skill premiums.” 

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To determine the skill premium for specific skills, they calculated the 50th and 75th percentile of salary levels for specific education levels and the advertisements that contained each competency or skill and calculated those same metrics for the advertisements that did not contain that skill. This gave them a “skill premium” value for each category.

To understand what this research means for technical skill, for bachelor's level jobs across disciplines that listed Python in the skills or descriptions category had a median salary of $94,250, as compared with a median salary of $79,500 for advertisement that did not specify Python. So, in this case, the “skill premium” would be $14,750 for Python. A negative skill premium indicates that the median salary for a job with a given skill is lower than the median salary for a job without that skill. The researchers found that specific engineering disciplines had specific software preferences. For example, SolidWorks appeared frequently in job advertisements for mechanical engineering.

Cathy Cecere is membership content program manager.