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Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Engineering
They are talking about this topic: General Skills
The quotes below are about this issue:
Entry-level engineering positions often require strong leadership and project management skills; some employers report spending a significant amount of time training new hires in these skills. They feel that capstone projects and additional group-focused coursework would help build these skills.
| "They don't have skills in leadership. They don't have skills in team-building. They really don't understand much of that and consequently we spend a lot of money training these people—especially the first three years with the company. You know, something like the Carnegie Training—like 12 weeks at three hours each and you get 36 hours. They don't grasp any of that at all. I don't know if they're not getting any of that in school, or if it's just not felt necessary to teach it in school? But most of our engineers actually manage a group of people." | Southwest |
| "We hire mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers. And I'd say the civil engineers have more of the soft skills than the mechanical engineers do. Just because of the—I'd have to assume the program. I think they have projects where they do public speaking and those types of things. Leadership of teams? I don't know." | Southwest |
| "Here's the other dilemma: If you remember a few years ago, the legislature in their infinite wisdom took it from 128 credits down to 120. In essence, they did it to save students' money, but in the end they ended up costing the students more. School systems might need to maximize their course content to stay on the cutting edge, but what gives are the soft skills. So, you no longer have those courses available in business—or anyplace else—so that you can broaden the base. So, what we're having to do now, and we're doing it through our strategic partnership series, is taking it through the non-credit side with a leadership certificate for those other soft skills. Taking it through a certificate-driven program. Hit it and move on to the next one. But that's what's happened, and that's why there is a little bit of a soft spot with those soft skills. I don't know if you're at 120 credits or 124 now, but they've had to compress everything because of the legislative edict." | Southwest |
| "One thing we're trying to do, and we're going to do at [MnSCU college] is apply for a job skills partnership grant to bring leadership, development skills, and maybe executive leadership." | Southwest |