Higher Education Skill Supply and Employers’ Skill Demand: A Study on Ethiopian Engineering Graduates
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Date
2024-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Demand for relevant skills and competences have increased with changing science and technology, globalization, and the intensity and complexity of the business environment across the world. This study investigated higher education skills supply and labor markets/employers skill demands in Ethiopia. Using the embedded design model of the mixed method approach (QUAN-qual), both primary and secondary sources of data were used to address the basic questions and hypotheses of the study. In addition to 260 respondents (90 employees, 40 employers, and 130 higher education instructors) who were recruited using simple random and purposive sampling techniques and filled out the study questionnaires, 15 individuals were purposefully selected and took part in key informant interviews. Data were analyzed using the mean, standard deviation, paired sample t-test, one-way ANOVA, Multiple comparison, and thematic analyses. The study found a wider mismatch between levels of higher education supply and labor market needs for indicators of discipline-specific, technical, interpersonal, and generic skills. Higher education moderately equips engineering graduates with the majority of indicators of these skill sets while labor market needs for the same skills remain high. The gap between the higher education skill supply and labor market need was widest for generic skills, followed by technical skills and interpersonal skills, but narrowest for discipline-specific skills. Employees, employers, and instructors have different views related to graduates‟ acquisition and employers‟ need for all types of skills under scrutiny. Employers and instructors believe that engineering graduates moderately acquire technical skills while employees believe that higher learning institutes well equip graduates with the same skills. For employers and instructors, technical skills are highly required in the engineering graduate labor market. Such mismatches between STEM skills supply and need hinder productive capacities, generate unemployment and underemployment, inflate average labor costs, affect firm-level profitability and the capacity of enterprises to innovate and adapt to changing market conditions. Strengthening collaboration with all stakeholders, including employers, in designing and implementing appropriate STEM curricula, conducting firm surveys to assess the skill needs, exposing students to lectures held by professionals outside universities, and implementing project-based and problem-oriented project-based learning to promote students‟ creativity and innovative, critical, and analytical thinking for future employment prospects should get prime priority in higher education. Future research should focus on the skills employees acquire at work through experience and the factors that contribute to the mismatch between the supply of higher education skills and employers‟ needs by including prospective graduates in sample selection.
Key words: Skills supply, skill demand, Higher Education, Engineering graduate
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Keywords
Skills supply, skill demand, Higher Education, Engineering graduate