Engineering Education, Skills and Industry Alignment – Comparative Analysis of the UK and USA

There is an ongoing debate on engineering education, future skills development and alignment of universities with industry. This debate includes discussion on whether graduating engineers have the required skills and competencies to make a positive impact in industry and the wider workplace. Academia is focused on maintaining the technical standard of engineering education, while industry seeks to recruit engineering graduates that not only have a solid grounding in the engineering fundamentals but also have effective professional skills, such as communication, team working and project management skills. Additionally, there is a need to consider how engineers can harness innovation and creativity as well as leveraging the emerging opportunities associated from digitization. In this regard there have been a series of reports that have investigated this area and many such reports tend to be issued at the national level. Therefore, this paper reports on a comparative analysis of studies and reports from the UK and USA that have focused on engineering education, skills development and industry alignment. This analysis has identified various insights and keys areas to be developed in the context of the Engineering Management Body of Knowledge. The paper concludes with recommendations on how the field of engineering management can be positioned to address the challenges and opportunities that have been identified. Copyright©2019. Reprinted with permission of the American Society for Engineering Management. International Annual Conference. All rights reserved.