XXX-X-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/$XX.00 ©20XX IEEE Skills requirement by Industrial Engineering students during vacation work Olufemi Adetunji Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa Olufemi.adetunji@up.ac.za Mikayla Pillay Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa mikaylapillay23@gmail.com Abstract— Engineering training should prepare students for industry work; hence, it is expected that the academic curriculum should be structured after the requirements of the industry. The objective of this research was to understand what Industrial Engineering (IE) skills are used in the industry by the university students during their vacation work. This may help in determining the level of emphasis placed on some of the skills with which students are imbued, and how soon the exposure to these skills should be during the training period. It was found out that the mostly used skills are the soft skills, and not the technical engineering skills imparted into the students. Moreover, even among the engineering skills used, most students make more extensive use of the basic engineering skills acquired earlier in their study years than the more advanced skills taught later in the Universities. The study indicates that it is important that the training of engineering students should place sufficient emphasis on teaching students on team dynamics and relationship management as this may be more central to their career, especially as they transition from student to working life. Keywords: engineering training, industrial engineering skills, soft skills, technical skills, vacation work. I. BACKGROUND A purpose of engineering education is to prepare students that can make contributions in the society, and adapt to the current global reality with its rapidly changing requirements. It is, hence, important that there is as little gap as possible between what the industry expects of the students, and how the students are prepared in the Universities. The determination of what these requirements are is important in the training of engineering students and has started to received attention from many training institutions, starting from the regulatory bodies. The University of Pretoria is one of the main universities training engineering students in South Africa, and Industrial Engineering (IE) is one of the engineering fields in which students are trained there. A requirement of all engineering students is exposure to practical work environments for 12 weeks during their training. This requirement was made by the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA); hence, all IE students do vacation work. These 12 weeks are broken into two periods, the first 6 weeks usually done after their second year and the remaining 6 weeks after their third year of study. A question of interest is what skills the students need to be equipped with so that they may be well suited for the environment in which they work. While there is no easy answer to this question across all engineering fields, it seems the skills have been broadly classified as being either technical or professional in all engineering professions. Hard skills are generally considered to be those required in the design and analysis of engineering problems, while soft skills help to function in the professional environment, which usually involves people from different backgrounds, a number of which may not be engineering [1]. The technical skill requirement is also diverse, not only across the different engineering fields, but even within a particular field of engineering. While some of these skills make sense to be taught earlier as prerequisite to some other skills, there are, however, a number of skills and techniques whose order may be moved around. This, therefore, begs the question about the order in which students are introduced to each of these skills are and the relative emphasis placed on each of them. This understanding is important both for the long-term performance of the IE graduate as well as the adaptability of students to the work environment after graduation. ECSA, on another hand, drew a lot of its requirements from those of the The International Engineering Alliance (IEA). IEA is an international cooperation created to enhance the mobility of engineering skills and portability of engineering qualifications. It provides a framework for the mutual recognition of competence of engineers across member nations. The IEA achieves its mandates through its constituents, the oldest of which is the Washington Accord, and which dates back to 1989 and guides the mutual recognition of the training and competency of Professional Engineers. The Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) applied for membership in 1993 and became a signatory in 1999 [2] and has since been guided by IEA tenets. The IEA has progressively emphasised more inclusion of soft skills in engineering training, and it is important to understand how relevant this is to the industry as well, particularly as ECSA has adopted the same measures in the definition of engineering requirement. While understanding the long-term relevance of these skills is in IE practice, the focus of this research is to understand how much the undergraduate students of IE in the University of Pretoria use each of these techniques in during their vacation work and possibly infer possible areas that may deserve some more attention in the preparation of the students for industry. II. RESEARCH AIMS AND QUESTIONS The aim of this research is to find out how useful the different skills taught to the IE students in the university are when the students are out during their vacation work, hence, to inform how the IE training programme may enhanced to support the students as they transition into practitioners in the industry. In addition, the study seeks to understand how complementary the techniques are, so that plans may be made about how the modules may be structured in a manner that the