Software engineering education: The gap between industry's requirements and graduates' readiness

Abstract

Software engineering is one of the most demanding jobs in software industry nowadays and its demand keeps on increasing. However, there are several issues arise with regard to readiness of Information Technology (IT) or Computer Science (CS) graduates from the point of views of software industry. This perspective causes the supply of graduates mainly in software engineering field seems to be insufficient. The industry claims that the software engineering graduates are not able to meet their requirements in software industry. This is really surprising to the academia that offers software engineering specialisation or related programmes in IT or CS field. This phenomenon creates the gap between industry's requirements and graduates' readiness which indirectly reflects the gap between software engineering education and industry. A number of studies and frameworks are available to ponder the issues on software engineering education and industry. This paper reports the gap between industry's requirements and graduates' readiness in software engineering perspectives to face the real world. From the findings, we conclude that there is a gap due to high demands from the industry in highly skilled fresh graduates. In contrast, future graduates are still lack of confidence and readiness though they specialise in software engineering field that has more job opportunities in IT or CS field.