Bidyut Baruah

Enhancing intrapreneurial skills of students through entrepreneurship education

Innovation orientation in a modern society is experiencing extensive complexity due to rise in globalization, revolutionary changes in technologies and standard of living. Intrapreneurship defined as the innovative initiatives undertaken inside an organization is an effective strategy to address these complexities systematically. Successful ideas within an organization occur due to the tireless persistence and practical imagination of intrapreneurs who are the smart innovators actively involved in the design and creation of new products, ventures and business models. Today there is an increasing global demand for such intrapreneurs and different universities are therefore adopting various entrepreneurship education and training programmes to cater to this. Pedagogy in higher education is also witnessing a significant rise in new interdisciplinary programmes specifically designed for non-business students such as art, engineering, and science students so as to develop their organizational management skills. This paper sheds light on these growing trends of different University programmes and examines their effectiveness. It utilizes an in-depth study of one such successful case: the MSc Engineering Management programme in the University of York, United Kingdom in its role of enhancing intrapreneurial skills of global students. This paper explores how this programme has successfully incorporated active and experiential learning tactics within its teaching modules to gradually train and build up the intrapreneurial skills for working in multidisciplinary teams and industries.

Is reflective writing an effective peer assessment tool for students in Higher Education

Today the ability to monitor and evaluate the performance of team members and identify their strengths and weaknesses is highly crucial in any organizational role. Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) are adopting different strategies in their teaching curricula and assessment methods to encourage the development of team management skills among graduates, one of which is peer assessment. It is an important component in the design of an effective learning environment in Higher Education (HE) and for promoting a strong participatory and collaborative culture among students. It provides students with a platform to not only engage with the HE learning process but also to learn from each other by receiving and giving critical feedback. Reflective writing in HE offers a flexible platform for students to discuss the contributions made by peers in teamwork however, not many researchers have looked at its potential as a peer assessment tool. This study addresses this gap by using the case study of the MSc Engineering Management (EM) programme at York (UK). Using the method of content analysis, this study looks at the quality of peer assessment and the skills gap analysis demonstrated in the reflective assignments students undertake in one of the modules. The findings show the viability and potential of this method for building peer assessment skills. It eliminates some of the limitations like bias among students usually encountered in other peer assessment tools. It also helps in skills gap analysis and for understanding group dynamics in teamwork. Students should therefore, be encouraged to seek the application of such tools for skills analysis, to build up confidence in peer assessment and boosting employability factors.

How universities and employers specify competence in generic skills findings from an analysis of job advertisements

The world of Higher Education (HE) uses ‘learning outcomes’ as the usual way of specifying what any particular educational activity is designed to do. They are outcome-based statements of the learning that is occurring in the programme. The learning outcome is also the basis upon which the ‘competence’ of the student is assessed. In technical subjects this assessment is relatively ‘hard’ in that the statement of competence in a topic such as Mathematics is relatively clear to the academic doing the assessment, the student being assessed and employers seeking that competence. The picture is less good when considering generic skills. Here the term “generic skills” is taken to be the same as transferable skills and overlaps considerably with employability skills and lifelong learning skills. This paper reports on one of the findings of a study that is exploring the mismatch in the terminology of generic skills and specifically how employers articulate the level of competence they seek in prospective employees as articulated through job adverts. The paper reports on an analysis of 92 online Biomedical Engineering, Hydro Energy and Solar Power job adverts. A total of 30 unique adjectives were identified including “exposure to” and “familiarity with” to “excellent”, “brilliant”, “impeccable” and “fantastic”. The paper briefly describes the overall research question and sets the work reported in the context of the wider project, defines the methodology being followed and presents the results including how the frequency of adjective usage changes with level of job position in the hierarchy. The conclusion drawn is that there is a gap in the way the competence in generic skills is specified between the supply and demand sides of the employment transition. The paper discusses the justification for a gap as well as the problems this causes.

What do job adverts tell Higher Education about the ‘shape’ of Biomedical Engineering Graduates?

Higher Education Institutions are required, at least in some Countries, to design their curricula taking into account the needs of relevant industry. Use of Industrial Advisory Committees is a common way of demonstrating this input. This paper explores an additional window to industry needs through the textual analysis of job advertisements. 36 internet published adverts using the “Biomedical Engineering” search phrase were downloaded and textually analysed to identify the mentioned technical skills, generic skills and the adjectives used to describe the required level of proficiency in them. Results of the analysis of these adverts, using qualitative research analysis software starts to reveal a relevant technical skills hierarchy that Higher Education can use to help inform curricular designed for this employment pathway. The analysis of the generic skills reveals those rated important by employers for different levels of jobs, again of potential use to curriculum designers. Finally the results reveal the adjectives used to show the level of ability employers seek of their graduates. Herein lies a significant difference across the supply and demand side of the first employment transition. The difference can be rationally explained but does not help in closing the gap between what Higher Education provides in terms of graduates and what Industry seeks. The paper concludes that dialogue between Industry and Higher Education could usefully focus on the way skills are defined and claims of ability warranted as a means of closing the “Higher Education is not gives us what employers want” claims.