Industrial and Systems Engineering for the 21st Century - Discovery and Assessing the Multi-Faceted Needs of Industry

摘要

Although industrial and systems engineers possess broad skill mixes and play diverse roles working in industry, it is hypothesized that industrial and systems engineers have unique fundamental core competencies and associated knowledge that distinguish themselves from other related disciplines. This study was intended to discover from an industry viewpoint what these core competencies and associated knowledge are and how or whether they change according to different key sample subgroups. The researcher suspects that industry's perception of what constitutes key competencies to produce ideal industrial and systems engineers may not be identical to what key competencies industry is actually utilizing. Therefore, this study was designed to discover if any differences exist along these two different dimensions by analyzing incumbents' responses. To accomplish this, the researcher developed a knowledge based survey instrument to identify what specific industrial and systems engineering (ISE) knowledge items (KI's) are being applied in industry jobs. In addition, this instrument also asked incumbents to rate these 350 KI's to determine how much educational emphasis should be placed on each of them for undergraduate education curriculum development.