This paper was presented at the 2008 Engineering Conference - Innovation Good Practice and Research in Engineering Education.
For most students in higher education employment upon graduation is a major priority and there is currently a lot of emphasis being placed on providing students with the ‘employability’ or ‘workplace’ skills they will need after graduation. The UK Centre for Materials Education (UKCME) has undertaken a survey of graduate materials engineers who have continued into a materials-related career and a parallel survey of materials academic staff from all UK higher education institutions (HEIs) teaching Materials Science and Engineering which focuses on the professional ‘workplace skills attitudes and abilities’ that materials students acquire during their academic studies and whether they match the skills attitudes and abilities that they require in the early stages of their professional careers. Graduates generally agreed with academics that they had been very well equipped for report writing laboratory skills and written communication but had not found laboratory skills as relevant to their early career as academics had predicted. With the exception of ‘laboratory skills’ the views of recent materials graduates suggest that the provision of more training in each of the ‘workplace skills abilities and attitudes’ would be of benefit to a graduate in the early stages of their professional careers.
