ENRICHING ENGINEERING GRADUATES’ HARD AND SOFT SKILLS TO INCREASE THEIR EMPLOYABILITY IN AN UNSTABLE JOB MARKET
ENRICHING ENGINEERING GRADUATES’ HARD AND SOFT SKILLS TO INCREASE THEIR EMPLOYABILITY IN AN UNSTABLE JOB MARKET

Summary/Abstract: In today’s tough competition for jobs in the domain of engineering in a rather volatile typeof economic and social context, young graduates should be equipped with better and more diversifiedhard and soft skills in order to get first employment in their field as soon as possible after graduation.It is then paramount that all educational factors of concern involved in training them should improvethe quantity and quality of their students’ professional and personal skills portfolio. Therefore, thepaper advances a range of complementary tasks, starting from an authentic input source text aboutthe launch of a new type of software item, making it the pretext for diversifying the task chainproposed to engineering students in tertiary education within the framework of an ESP practicalcourse. The range of task requirements proposed is meant to involve the learners in a series ofactivities that will get them out of the classroom, in a flexible manner, based on collaborative workwithin a project, by asking them to cross the borderline towards the real world in order to solve taskssuch online searches for information, creating product presentations, organizing a marketing andadvertising campaign, designing instruments to carry out economic surveys and so on.

• Details
• Contents