representative personal traits by using factor analysis. Those five personal traits are called ―Big Five‖ that represents an overall pattern of all personality traits and recent papers have examined the link between these traits and income, (Borghans, Lex, Duckworth and Heckman 2008).

By using factor analysis, 26 skills listed in the questionnaire were grouped into three factors using the importance ratings. Table 3 below presents the resulting groups (factors) of skills generated by factor analysis. Skills emboldened in Table 3 are those with more than 0.55 of factor loadings.<sup>7</sup>

**Table 3: Skills grouped into Three Factors**

|**Factor 1**|**Factor 2**|**Factor 3**|
|---|---|---|
|**(Core Employability Skills)**|**(Professional Skills)**|**(Communication Skills)**|
| **Integrity**| **Identify, formulate, and solve**| **Written communication**|
|<br> **Self-discipline**<br> **Reliability**<br> **Self-motivated**|<br>**technical/engineering problems**<br> **Design a system, component, or**<br>**process to meet desired needs**| **Design & conduct experiments,**<br>**and analyze and interpret data**<br> **Reading**|
| **Entrepreneurship Skills**<br> **Teamwork**| **Use appropriate/modern tools,**<br>**equipment, technologies**|<br> **Communication in English**<br> Technical Skills|
| **Understands and takes**<br>**directions for work**| **Apply knowledge of mathematics,**<br>**science, engineering**| Verbal communication<br> Basic computer|
|**assignments**| **Customer Service Skills**|<br> Advanced computer|
|<br> **Willingness to learn**<br> Flexibility| Knowledge of contemporary issues<br> Creativity||
| Empathy|||

Table A2-2 in Annex 2 lists all skills with factor loadings that explain dimensions of each factor in more details. The three factors above account for more than 85% of the total variance.

The first factor predominantly consists of personal characteristics. The skills with high factor loading are ― _Integrity_ ‖, ― _Self-discipline_ ‖, ― _Reliability_ ‖, ― _Self-motivated_ ‖, ― _Entrepreneurship Skills_ ‖, ― _Teamwork_ ‖, ― _Understands and takes directions for work assignments_ ‖, and ― _Willingness to learn_ ‖. This factor is named **_Core Employability Skills_** , since these skills are not occupation specific, but cuts across occupations. Other studies refer to this set of skills as generic, catalytic, core and/or employability.

The second factor is essentially comprised of engineering specific skills, of which the following are the skills with high loading; ― _Identify, formulate, and solve technical/engineering problems_ ‖, ― _Design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs_ ‖, ― _Use appropriate/modern tools, equipment, technologies_ ‖, and ― _Apply knowledge of mathematics, science, engineering_ ‖. Following the HR-literature and other employer surveys, we call this factor for ― **_Professional Skills_** ‖. In the engineering education literature, this set of skills is also referred to as technical skills.

> 7 Factor loadings are the correlation coefficients between each variable and the factor. Items with higher load are more relevant to the respective factor.  Based on the guidelines made by Comrey and Lee (1992), items (skills) that load more than 0.55 are considered ― _very good_ ‖.  TableA2-2 in Annex 2 shows the skills with the factor loadings.

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