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Investigating the skill gap between graduating students and industry expectations

Published: 31 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Graduating computer science and software engineering students do not always possess the necessary skills, abilities, or knowledge when beginning their careers in the software industry. The lack of these skills and abilities can limit the productivity of newly hired, recent graduates, or even prevent them from gaining employment. This paper presents the results of an empirical study where twenty-three managers and hiring personnel from various software companies in the United States and Europe were interviewed. Participants were asked about areas where recent graduates frequently struggled when beginning employment at their companies and which skill deficiencies might prevent a recent graduate from being hired. The results of this study indicate that recent graduates struggle with using configuration management systems (and other software tools), effectively communicating with co-workers and customers, producing unit tests for their code, and other skills or abilities. The results also indicate that a lack of project experience and problem solving abilities are the most commonly cited issues preventing students from gaining employment. This research is intended to assist educators in identifying areas where students may not measure up the expectations of industry companies and in improving the curriculum at their universities to better prepare them for their future careers.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE Companion 2014: Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering
May 2014
741 pages
ISBN:9781450327688
DOI:10.1145/2591062
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 31 May 2014

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  1. Computer science education
  2. Computer science pedagogy
  3. Required skills
  4. Software developer

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