The importance of professional skills in future engineering jobs is beyond discussion.
Increasing numbers of universities have integrated training for such skills in their
engineering curricula to prepare students to become highly qualified employees. HU
University of Applied Sciences Utrecht also implemented professional skills training
in the IT Bachelor program to help our students develop towards successful and
highly demanded IT engineers. However, these courses consistently score low in our
student satisfaction surveys. To find the cause of this negative evaluation, we
previously studied the motivation, attitude and anxiety of IT students towards
learning soft, or professional, skills. This former quantitative study indicates that
our IT students tend to have a positive motivation and attitude toward learning
professional skills, while ’anxiety’ in learning professional skills increases from the
first to the third year.
In this qualitative study, we try to find causes for the increasing anxiety among IT students.
We interviewed six third and fourth year IT students and after analysing
these interviews we found that these students have experienced the need for
professional skills during their internship. Besides, they emphasize the need of
obtaining these skills for future employment. From the analysis of the interviews, it
also appears that IT students rather felt difficulty in obtaining communication skills
then anxiety. A possible cause for this difficulty mentioned by students was the
character of students and the influence of the teacher. To overcome this difficulty
obtaining communication skills, students suggested that training skills in an
authentic engineering situation is more effective than doing exercises with simulated
cases. However, the results of this study did not yield a conclusive insight in the
cause of increased anxiety, hence further research is needed.
