An analysis of job advertisements for software engineering employability skills and knowledge: Jordan as a case study
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Abstract
Well prepared software engineering (SE) graduates for job markets is a big challenge for employers and industry. This challenge has been raised due to the lack of the required knowledge and skills. For instance, some of the graduates are technically strong but lack of communication and/or English language skills and vice versa. Therefore, software engineering graduate’s knowledge and skills have a direct impact on their job opportunity. Thus, universities should provide SE graduates with the required knowledge and skills that actually in demand by employment agencies and software industries. This study investigates the gaps between universities course syllabus and employment agencies through job advertisements analysis in Jordan as a first stage of this research. The collected job advertisements (178 job advertisement) are analyzed based on a search strategy in order to acquire the most important hard and soft skills required by industry. The findings of the study indicated that work experience and English language proficiency are the most occurred skills from both types of skills. In addition, knowledge gap of other hard and soft skills is discovered which might help in providing graduates with the required skills and minimizing the gap between the graduates and employers.
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References
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