Graduate skills for the Power Engineering sector: On the match between supply and demand

Higher Education Institutions have been up-skilling learners and preparing them for employment since the first University was established in 859AD in Fez, Morocco. The education process is a matching process of skills between what the learner wants and what employers require. To be effective this matching process requires both parties to understand what skills are required, to have a common understanding of the skills and how to articulate them and in how competence in them are verified. Traditionally Higher Education programmes have had a focus on developing technical skills. In Engineering programmes this typically involves establishing a solid foundation in understanding of Mathematics, in the principles of how objects interact with their environment, design and development of system components and systems, how to fabricate and test and how to professionally document work. Industry is increasingly expressing the need for softer skills, variously called generic, transferable, employability and skills for life. This paper shows the place of technical and generic skills in the employment transition by presenting a generic model for the transition from education into employment and looks at some example skills from UK power engineering job adverts to illustrate the definitional and warranting issues. The adverts show that employers use some very high-level skills constructs in their requirements for new recruits and very general adjectives to describe the required competence in these skills. The skill requirements, as indicated by the label used to define them, whilst overlapping with the skills being embedded into education programmes do not align closely. Further, and potentially more worryingly, the statement of the degree of competence in the skills do not align at all with the methods of measurement of competence in the skills even where such measurements exist. The paper concludes with some general comments and recommendations for ways forward.