Hiring Millennial Students as Software Engineers: A Study in Developing Self-Confidence and Marketable Skills

Software engineering courses and internships aim to equip students with skills that are vital in the software engineering industry. Millennial students are expected to emerge from an undergraduate education ready to step directly into software developer positions and succeed. And yet, for a variety of reasons, these experiences often fail to adequately prepare students for the expectations of the industry. The capabilities of a typical undergraduate simply do not align well with the needs of the industry, resulting in disappointed employers, unhappy employees, and a poor reputation for the quality of a higher education in software engineering. This paper describes the Student Software Developers Program, where students are developing real-world applications that solve business needs for departments on campus, leveraging those departments as customers. Students are immersed in the program for a full year, providing them with adequate time to experience both the depth and breadth of skills desired by the curriculum and by industry. Our evaluation shows the program provided students with confidence in their engineering abilities, a wealth of hard and soft skills valuable in industry, all while learning software engineering in a way that aligns with the values of their generation.