remembering and understanding? Answering these questions require a larger employer survey and possibly a competence assessment of engineering graduates.<sup>14</sup>

**_Summary Analysis of Skill Gaps_** : The previous sections show that employers are likely to perceive _Soft Skills_ more important than _Professional Skills_ . However, engineering graduates with limited and weak _Professional Skills_ are undesirable for employers.  The survey results, for instance, show a clear signal to the Problem Solving that is under _Professional Skills_ .  As shown earlier, Problem Solving has the largest gap in _Professional Skills_ and the second least satisfying skill of all skills.

Wide gaps can be observed among almost all skills. This is more obvious for higher order skills, such as Problem Solving that falls in _Professional Skills_ . Further, the mean scores of skill gaps in _Professional Skills_ are higher than those in _Soft Skills_ , which are 0.91 and 0.88 points, respectively. Therefore, the importance of _Professional Skills_ should not be disparaged.

# **6. Summary Findings and Policy Implications**

Educating engineers with a comprehensive and deep set of skills that are in demand would be of tremendous importance for the employability of individual engineers and for the country‘s development. Large economic sectors, such as IT, infrastructure, power and water, rely critically upon engineering skills and technologies. This employer survey provides important new insight on which specific skills are important for employers and where the graduates currently fall short. In what follows, we present the main findings and the policy implications that we draw from each finding. However, it is important to keep three caveats in mind: (i) the quality improvements in education lie squarely within the scope of pedagogy, education policy and education management, which is outside of the scope of this paper; (ii) the engineers evaluated by employers should be seen as the end product of the entire education system, not just engineering education. The engineering colleges receive graduates from the secondary education system with a set of skills upon which they add. In particular, the _Soft Skills_ are influenced by a prior schooling and the family setting; and (iii) although the sample size is fairly large compared to similar surveys, it is relatively small compared to the large population of Indian firms. Further, the survey may be biased due to a small size of convenience sampling and a possible oversampling of large firms. Keeping these important caveats in mind, we limit the recommendations to a set of broad actions within engineering education to improve the skill set of future engineers.

**There is substantial dissatisfaction with the quality of graduates.** 64% of employers are only somewhat satisfied or worse with the current engineering graduate skills. This confirms the finding of a number of other surveys showing that the skills set of fresh engineers is inadequate. Although, there are always caveats when comparing satisfaction surveys internationally, we find that Indian employers are less satisfied with their engineers compared to US employers. Obviously, the dissatisfaction suggests that renewed

> 14 The same question should be posed as to graduates of other stream of higher education in India and to to other levels of the education system. Clark, 2001 examines the culture of pedagogy in the primary and secondary education system. She finds a pervasive focus of teaching and learning in India on lower order thinking-typified by repetition and memorization-and the lack of attention given to the development of higher-order thinking.

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