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Skills Gaps in the Industry: Opinions of Embedded Software Practitioners

Published: 09 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Many practitioners in the software-intensive embedded industry often face difficulties after beginning their careers due to misalignment of the skills learned at the university with what is required in the workplace. Companies spend crucial resources to train personnel whose academic backgrounds are not only based on “computing disciplines” but also on non-computing ones. Analyzing the gap between the software industry and academia is important for three reasons: (1) for employers, hiring properly trained practitioners allows them to spend less time in training them while incorporating them more efficiently into the workforce; (2) for practitioners, knowing the most important skillset is helpful to increase their chance of employability; and (3) for academia, understanding the necessary skillset is critical to making curriculum changes. To achieve these objectives, we conducted a survey that yielded responses from 659 software professionals working worldwide in different roles. In this study, we only included the responses of 393 embedded software practitioners whose undergraduate degree was completed in Turkey, working in 10 countries. This article sheds light on the most important skills in the embedded software industry by presenting various cross-factor analyses. Understanding the coverage of these skills in the curriculum (mostly in Turkish universities) helps bridge the gaps, which can and should be achieved through more Industry Academia Collaborations (IACs).

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  • (2025)An International Examination of Non-Technical Skills and Professional Dispositions in Computing -- Identifying the Present Day Academia-Industry Gap2024 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3689187.3709610(124-174)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Understanding and measuring skill gaps in Industry 4.0 — A reviewTechnological Forecasting and Social Change10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123206201(123206)Online publication date: Apr-2024
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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems  Volume 20, Issue 5
September 2021
342 pages
ISSN:1539-9087
EISSN:1558-3465
DOI:10.1145/3468851
  • Editor:
  • Tulika Mitra
Issue’s Table of Contents
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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Publication History

Published: 09 July 2021
Accepted: 01 April 2021
Revised: 01 April 2021
Received: 01 January 2021
Published in TECS Volume 20, Issue 5

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Author Tags

  1. Hard skills
  2. embedded software industry
  3. industry academia collaboration
  4. practitioner survey
  5. soft skills
  6. software engineering education

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)An International Examination of Non-Technical Skills and Professional Dispositions in Computing -- Identifying the Present Day Academia-Industry Gap2024 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3689187.3709610(124-174)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Understanding and measuring skill gaps in Industry 4.0 — A reviewTechnological Forecasting and Social Change10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123206201(123206)Online publication date: Apr-2024
  • (2023)Dispositions that Computing Professionals Value in the WorkplaceProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3568813.3600118(270-283)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Beyond the Cognitive: Educator Readiness for Fostering Dispositions2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343241(1-5)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
  • (2021)Modeling knowledge and practices in the software industry: An exploratory study of Turkey-educated practitionersJournal of Computer Languages10.1016/j.cola.2021.10106366(101063)Online publication date: Oct-2021

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