How well aligned are the views of generic competence development between Electrical and Information Engineering students, their faulty and their employers?

As faculty members it is part of our job, in conjunction with local and/or National government regulations, our institutional rules, regulations and guidance and our faculty Industry advisory committees, to design and deliver appropriate degree programmes to our students. But what is appropriate and does our thinking align with that of the students we educate? This paper presents a project that set out to investigate the alignment of the perception of the importance (to future careers) and level of development of a large set of generic and specific competences. The target group for the project was Electrical and Information Engineering (EIE) students, faculty and employers across Europe. The body undertaking this project was the European Association for Education in Electrical Engineering as part of the European Union funded EIE-Surveyor project. In total, 3,275 completed questionnaires were analyzed and analyses have been carried out by gender, academic study level, country and by competence both individually and in groups they for through the application of standard statistical data reduction techniques. This paper introduces the project and its background and explains the research methodology and analyses employed. It shows key results and their impact and provides a set of recommendations for future related work.