The Immersive Placement Experience: Sink Or Swim?

Abstract

To excel in their respective engineering fields, engineering students need to be equipped with a combination of technical and interpersonal skills. Central to excellent interpersonal skills is good communication. The aim of the study is to evaluate how well-prepared mechanical and design engineering students felt entering into their industrial placements, using a UK university as a pilot case study. For the study interviews were carried out with final year students who had previously completed an industrial placement year, focussing on communication, workplace diversity, technical working methods and university teaching styles. Reponses were anonymised, coded and analysed using quantitative and qualitative methods. Nine engineering students were interviewed regarding their placement experience and were asked to rate how well they thought their engineering programmes helped in developing these skills. Two key findings were: 1) students on average spent 60 % or more of their placement work using their communication skills and 2) students felt more could be done to prepare them for individual presentations and individual projects before placement. On average the students felt marginally more prepared with the interpersonal skills element compared to the technical skills element. The survey also highlighted that the students' understanding of what falls under the umbrella of workplace diversity was narrow, and they did not classify skill differences as a component of diversity. The student's honest feedback allowed a collation of proposed recommendations for both the mechanical and design engineering courses.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.21427/4E77-8965
Divisions: College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > School of Engineering and Technology > Mechanical, Biomedical & Design
College of Engineering & Physical Sciences
College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > Aston Institute of Materials Research (AIMR)
Aston University (General)
Additional Information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Event Title: 51st Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, SEFI 2023
Event Type: Other
Event Dates: 2023-09-11 - 2023-09-14
Uncontrolled Keywords: Communication,Diversity,Industrial Placement,Training,General Engineering,Education
ISBN: 9782873520267
Last Modified: 02 Dec 2024 09:17
Date Deposited: 18 Jan 2024 13:50
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://arrow.t ... 023_prapap/134/ (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Conference contribution
Published Date: 2023
Authors: Shaikh, M.
Alaswad, A. (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-7828-7924)
Junaid, Sarah (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-9460-710X)

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