A Preliminary Case Study on Improving Engineering Students Competency through Industrial Training in a Private University

Engineers form an important part of our technical workforce to successfully transform Malaysia into a fully developed nation as envisaged in the Vision 2020 document. Thus, it is essential for higher learning institutions in Malaysia to produce effective and competent graduates who are able to contribute to the current needs and rapid changes in the engineering industry. However, a key challenge faced by engineering programmes is to address the misalignment in the graduates produced and the industry needs. To address this, industrial training in universities plays an important role in bridging academia and industry where students are able to experience real-life problems as opposed to only classroom challenges. In addition, it is also important that engineering students in universities are well equipped with critical thinking skills and strong technical knowledge to face current and future challenges in industries. In this study, feedback and evaluation forms from industries were analysed to explore the working competency of engineering students in a new engineering programme. It identifies aspects that call for improvement to successfully help engineering students’ competency at workplace.This paper also offers a few suggestions on Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) based on the Plan- Do-Check-Act (PDCA) model to improve strategies prior to, during and post industrial training for the betterment of this new engineering programme.