Preferred Roles of Industrial Engineering and Management Students - An exploratory European analysis
| Main Authors: | Heyen, Viktoria, Serôdio, Maria, Oliveira, Ricardo E. de, Özdağ, Ece, Craps, Sofie |
|---|---|
| Format: | Proceeding Journal |
| Bahasa: | eng |
| Terbitan: |
, 2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
https://zenodo.org/record/5096651 |
Daftar Isi:
- The European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management (ESTIEM) is a non-profit organization of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) students, founded in 1990 to promote the connection between students, companies, and professors by its activities and initiatives. Through its partnership with the European-funded “Professional Roles and Employability of Future EngineeRs” (PREFER) project, whose objective is to allow students to better understand what engineers do and what kind of engineers they want to be, ESTIEM started a research to better understand the preferred engineering roles of students in several universities in Europe. In the PREFER project, three professional roles for early career engineers - Product Leadership (focusing on radical innovation), Operational Excellence (focusing on process optimisation) and Customer Intimacy (focusing on tailored solutions) - have been identified. Furthermore, competencies essential to be successful in those roles have been associated with them. Based on this model, two tests for engineering students were developed including the PREFER Explore test, which identifies the preference of the engineering roles. Understanding the importance of knowing the competencies needed for future engineers, the goal of the research is to map the possible differences in regard to the preferred roles among IEM students in Europe. This paper reports the findings of the Explore test run among six universities in Europe that are members of the ESTIEM network (Lisbon, Porto, Liège, İstanbul-Boğaziçi, Eindhoven and Saint-Petersburg). From those, Bachelor and Master students in IEM were invited, regardless of their association with ESTIEM (n=179). Findings indicate that the roles preference vary inside each university, even though the population shares the same educational background, and throughout the different European universities analysed. Furthermore, it explores the potential factors influencing those preferences based on students’ insights and previous research conducted by ESTIEM.