THE NEED FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT SKILLS IN NEWLY GRADUATED ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS

A three-week intensive module on Project Management is currently under development as part of a new five year undergraduate M.Eng degree course at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Edinburgh. To ascertain what should be taught in this course, we have undertaken a survey of first-destination employers of our own graduates over the past five years. This paper describes the analysis and results of that survey.

An address list of 70 first-destination employers was collated from various sources, and a questionnaire was sent to the "training manager" with a request that it be answered by him/her and also circulated to any of the line management who were directly involved with new-graduate staff.

The address list was restricted to UK-based engineering-related firms, and the questions were asked in relation to "Graduates in Electrical Engineering" in general rather than being restricted to Edinburgh graduates alone. The objective was to derive the course content, and a preliminary list of twenty topics was drawn up by collating the opinions drawn from several sources including: commercial training courses, industrial training programmes, and informal interviews with managers and trainers from industry.

In all communications, it has been emphasised that the aim of the course was to equip our students with sufficient Management skills to enable them to quickly assume a level of responsibility commensurate with their technical ability. Thus the results of this survey are not applicable to Management in general, but rather to the skills which current management would like to find in their new, junior Project Managers.

Respondents were asked to circle the appropriate number on each of two scales to say how far they believed that their recruits who are Graduates in Electrical Engineering should posses the skills/knowledge in each of the twenty topics, and how far they currently do. The two scales ranged from 1 to 4 representing should have to do not need, and commonly have to commonly have not for each topic. Finally, respondents were asked to designate their primary responsibility.

In all, 35 replies were received from 28 different sites (40% response), which is generally considered to be a good rate of replies from an unsolicited survey.

The analysis of the data was performed using SPSS-X. The scale of 1-4 was used directly as numerical values - since differences in these values leads to intuitively valid interpretation.

The initial screening of the data was performed using a simple cluster analysis (using single linkage) to highlight any respondents which were consistently unlike the others. Two such cases were found and eliminated from subsequent analysis: in one the respondent felt that the graduate engineer was already over-trained in all aspects of project management, and in the other case, the respondent (a Consultant) annotated the reply to the effect that graduates should not be trained in Project Management by the University, but rather by the respondent him/her-self.

The main conclusions to this survey are drawn from simple analysis of Means of the responses given. Tables 1 and 2 show the (ordered) Mean values of responses for each topic indicating perceived need and current occurence. Table 3 shows the (ordered) Means of the Difference of the responses for each topic; this then gives a "desired improvement" value. The design of the questionnaire had the two scales placed directly next to each other for each topic, so it seems fair to assume that the respondent would have been making this comparison.

In interpreting Tables 1 and 2, one should note that: the lower the value the more desired/frequent is the skill; 2.5 is the middle response; and 2.0 is the least positive response open to an individual respondent. The following observations can be made:

• Although 15/20 of the topics were perceived as desirable (>2.5), only one topic: problem solving skills, was found more often than not.
• Five topics are generally seen as not desirable (<2.5), and only nine topics are more often required than not (>2.0).
• Twelve topics are seen as requiring at least a one point improvement in the training of undergraduates.

The aim of this survey is to devise the syllabus for a 15 day intensive course for our fifth-year undergraduates. In terms of the desired training improvement of newly-graduated recruits there is clearly one primary topic: Personal Time-Management, which is also rated as the third most needed topic.

There is then a group of secondary topics for which improvements of greater than 1.4 are requested: Quality Assurance, Interpersonal Communication Skills, Project Planning, and Team and People Management.

Finally there are two tertiary topics of Presentation Skills and Effective Meeting Management. After these there is a natural break in the Desired Improvement values. The one exception to this grouping of topics for the proposed course development at Edinburgh is the topic of Leadership Skills for the resons outlined in the next section.

The omissions from this list are also interesting, and may indicate the fields of expertese which are generally considered to belong outwith the engineers' sphere of influence. Finance, law, product marketing are all the stuff of MBAs, but not apparently of use to graduate engineers at their initial levels of responsibility.

Using One Way Analysis of Variance with respect to primary job responsibility, we tested the hypothesis that the populations from which the groups were selected had the same means - that is, whether the groups agree. We found two discrepancies (at above the 5% level of significance): the need for Presentation Skills and for Leadership Skills.

Tables 4 and 5 show how these two topics differ with respect to the primary responsibility of the respondent. (Recall that the lower the main, the more important is the topic).

With Presentation Skills, the interesting difference is between R&D and Personnel&Training with the latter emphasising the need for Presentation skills. With Leadership Skills the interesting difference is between General Management and Personnel&Training, where the former place far higher significance on the value of these skills.

The objective of this work was to construct a syllabus for the forthcoming course development. This will be done taking the primary, secondary and tertiary topics outlined above with the addition of Leadership Skills as a tertiary topic due to the high emphasis placed upon this topic by General Management.