Soft Skills: A Professional Development Curriculum to Enhance the Employability of Engineering Students.

The issue of employability of professional students has become very serious and critical in many countries including India. The biggest challenge facing institutions of technical education is to develop employable skills, enhance knowledge and make engineering students more attractive to employers. Though the standard of academia has been steadily moving ahead, the updating process of curriculum with respect to soft skills is not as fast as expected by the industries. Hence a framework is needed to develop creative and innovative ways to give the engineering students a competitive edge. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop a professional curriculum to enhance the employability of engineering students, especially identifying modules of soft skills with the perspective of the employers, placement professionals, corporate trainers and observations from the newspapers and job websites on job opportunities. The authors studied related research papers and held a series of discussions with the experts of soft skills. The findings and discussions suggest that (i) Engineering institutions should recognize the importance of soft skills, (ii) integrate important modules of soft skills in the engineering curriculum, (iii) integrate higher-order skills and (iv) interact more with employers of the region or sector to understand the particular demand for skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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