Ph.D. students within the area of Software Engineering often work in very confined and focused subareas. However, studies show that if the Ph.D. student aims at working in industry later on, the need for the so-called soft skills is high. This paper concludes on two surveys made to understand whether Ph.D. students within the 'Erasmus +' project Joint Programs and Framework for Doctoral Education in Software Engineering perceived the soft skills to be of importance for them to learn. The conclusions are that the students are aware of the soft skills but often do not consider it to be of importance to formally train these.
•Software and its engineering •Software creation and
management •Collaboration in software development •Programming
teams
Over the past decades, software development with distributed
teams across a region, country, or around the globe has become
an established pattern named Global Software Engineering
(GSWE)
(Russia, Jordan, Finland, UK, Germany, Denmark) and Ph.D. students could participate in one or several of the schools dependent on their interest and availability. The schools have been running over the three years from 2015 to 2018. The peculiarity of this group of Software Engineering students is a high level of training in the specialty, i.e. in the field of hard skills. This is usually the result of individual long-term work in basic university with the scientific adviser in a narrow field of research and development.
soft skills is described in more detail as a background. Section 3 describes the methodology of the paper. Section 4 includes a description of the survey carried out and the analysis made of the results. In section 5, the conclusions are presented. 2
For a software developer in Microsoft, a number of soft skills are
required
important qualities of the best Google managers seven are soft skills, and all the competencies of the STEM group are in the last eighth place. In 2017 another study by Google (Project Aristotle,
ments demonstrate many Soft Skills, among which emotional safety dominates.
A systematic approach to the study of this phenomenon was
applied in the study of the University of Washington
Russian universities have thoroughly elaborated methods of
teaching hard skills, created State Educational Standards and
educational programs in their specialties
PBL is a learner-centred pedagogical methodology in which
students are assessed on their ability to go through a problem-solving
process usually based on real-life situations
Very litle research has been carried out to understand the views of the students themselves about the skills they need acquire for future work, and almost none asked opinions of Ph.D. level students specialized in Software Engineering. iThs paper extends and is based on earlier works by Gadasina et al (2016, 2017) reporting on surveys made with a group of 31 high level Ph.D. students who are currently engaged in the doctoral programs in Software Engineering at the international PWs@PhD Project. In both surveys, the students were asked about their views towards acquiring soft skills as part of their future work competence. In Gadasina et al. (2016) processing and statistical analysis results of the writen survey allowed identifying groups of the most significant for student’s professional skills for future work; to find out the Ph.D. students level of knowledge and mastering these skills; to evaluate the student’s intention to obtain them.
At the very beginning of the 21st century three largest software
and hardware companies Microsoft, Cisco and Intel set up an ‘XXI
Century Skills’ Project2 to develop a new educational system
because they were concerned that universities were not producing
graduates that could fit best into the digital work places and the
new manufacturing system. In a short time, researchers of
education from all over the world denfie what was meant by XXI
century complex skills, such as a collaborative problem solving
As mentioned, two surveys have been carried out to understand
the students’ perception of their needs in soft skills. In the study
by Gadasina et al. (2016) the list of skills named and ranked by
students was compared with a list of skills required by employers
in the areas close to the Software Engineering. According to the
Burning Glass Technologies report, in ‘Project Management,
Research and Strategy Cluster’ of required skills “research, project
management, negotiation and analytic skills are in particular
demand among high-skill, high paying jobs in families such as
management and research. These jobs have experienced wage growth
and expanded employment opportunities in recent years.”
In the second survey described in more detail in
Statistical analysis showed, that maximum value of residuals (+0,89) in the rfist Ways of iThnking group is for Implement Innovations skills, with that such kind of skills is absent in the list of skills elaborated by this group members themselves. It may mean students do not see innovations in pedagogical process at their universities, and it could be supposed that atention to Implement Innovations skills are absent in University courses. However, it does not mean that they are on big demand on the labour market for Software Engineering positions.
A high need for mastering Creativity and Decisions Making skills (+0,64 & +0,43) is expected. The traditional educational process in the academic style pays litle atention to the development of these skills, which are obviously in demand among employers. On the contrary, respondents believe that they are in good standing during their studies at the university in Learning to Learn (–0,29), Critical iThnking ( –0,11) and, to a lesser extent, Problem Solving (+0,21) skills. This, apparently, is due to the fact that for Software Engineering specialty this soft skills are more related to technical hard skills whose mastering is somehow included in the curriculum.
To avoid loading the text by clustered dendrograms and diagrams cluster analysis results presented below in 4 summary tables for the four XXI Century skills groups. Each table summarizes the results of processing responses in the form of an estimate of the percentage size of the following 4 groups of students who believe: o o o o that they have the skills and intend to master them, that they have the skills and don’t intend to master them, that they don’t have the skills but intend to master them, that they don’t have the skills and don’t intend to master. For the 1st group of skills Ways of Thinking , summary table is:
Don’t intent to master hTe intent of the most of respondents to master and develop this group of skills even if they already have it, means that the Ways of Thinking group of skills is highly important for Software Engineering students.
Second Ways of Working group imply skills to Communicate clearly and to Collaborate with others eefctively. Certainly, the ability to express clearly own thoughts and ideas for others eefctively is important for any specialist. Typically, it involves the exchange of information between people in a face-to-face meeting, such as negotiating between developers and business consultants and managers, more often between developers themselves, or discussing problems at a workshop etc. However, in Global SWE projects such direct communication between developers from diferent countries of the world is usually impossible due to their separation in space and time, therefore communication is carried out mainly in wrietn form. Distributed Linux GSWE developmen t is an excellent example4.
Communicating programmers mainly is discussing and reviewing code, sometimes simply viewing comments on the repository without explicit conversation, but you necessarily need good skills in clear writing and properly understanding e-mails. It follows from the answers, that Collaboration (+0,35) and especially Teamwork (+0,55) have a weak presence in respondents’ training, in less degree it concerns Communication (+0,29) skills. Again, traditional classical training programs at universities do not contribute to the development of the skills of this group, while PhDstudents themselves feel the need for their development. This should be noted, as these skills are in high demand.
Don’t intent to master
68% 00% Don’t have skills 13% 19%
group of skills, it means that they understand the importance of continually improving skills significant for them.
The next third group Tools for Working contains Information, Media and ICT literacies. Media literacy (+10) shows students had not mastered it at universities. ICT literacy (–0.03) and Information literacy (–0.13) are evidently the important skills for SWE specialities so in Universities they are learned more. That’s why the students consider them to be known enough and is not interested in further learning. This makes sense in the case when these subjects could be learned and extended by himself.
Don’t have skills 4 https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.15/process/2.Process.html 19% 23%
Don’t intent to master 45% 13%
develop thinking skills, content knowledge, and social and
emotional competencies to navigate complex life and work
environments. This and earlier
Don’t intent to master Almost a third part of respondents don’t intend to master this type of skills despite they don’t have an experience in these skills. We can suppose that respondents may believe that these skills are innate and it is impossible to learn them. Again, the most of respondents who believe to have such skills are intent to develop them and vice versa.
experienced specialists: Leadership can be a factor preventing getting an ordinary job position in some companies; Social and
Mastery of 21st Century themes and Core subjects (English, world languages, arts, mathematics, economics, science, geography, history, government and civics) is essential for all students in the 21st century. In addition to these Core subjects, schools and universities should move to promote the mastery of academic content at much higher levels by integrating the Interdisciplinary themes of the 21st century into the core subjects. The interest of the respondents to the skills of this Interdisciplinary group can be the sign not of the lack of studying these themes in the universities but of the importance of the skills in general. For the professionals within the area of Software Engineering following Literacies are very important: Health (+1.10), Entrepreneurial (+0.94), Environmental (+0.90), Financial (+0.68), Civic (+0.61) and Business (+48).
pay attention to the development of the soft skills in order to increase the competitiveness of graduates. Carried out studies have shown that Software Engineering PhD-students understand the need to master the soft skills competencies as personal qualities that enable them to interact effectively and harmoniously during training process and on the working place, and they are ready to study them. Students emphasize the following skills as the most important: leadership, interdisciplinary collaboration, communication, critical thinking, career preparation and planning, entrepreneurship, responsibility.
5
must first of all have the required set of hard skills – such as to design, write, maintain, and test code, and necessary knowledge of Mathematics, Computer Science and related subject. Modern Software Engineering also includes such activities as project management, establishing the development process, communicating with the team and other teams in cross cultural and/or distributed environment. Delivering the code only is insufficient in modern complex contextual technical conditions, the appropriate level of soft skills is also necessary for a good software engineer and R&D, especially for a manager position.
ware engineers show that Ph.D. students understand the need to master soft skills and are ready to learn them in university. Novice Software Engineers are often low proficient of how to become professionals. Papers Gadasina at al. (2016, 2017) itemizes a set of skills that they might aim to achieve from trainings, projects at work, mentoring, or self-regulation for enhancing personality qualities and target areas for improvement. It is well known that the adaptation of the software engineer to the project is critical, novices may also use these results to find the right fit with prospective employers and teams, in terms of the skills they value as different teams emphasize various skills differently. Learning skills from the lists of skills, mentioned above, may also help novices better present themselves to employers. They might demonstrate to employers that they possess or can develop those hard and soft skills which experienced engineers and managers value.
ing resumes or presenting themselves in interviews. 5 https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/education/se2014.pdf
choices, teaching methods, and learning objectives in traditional
educators’ staff may consider adding courses on new topics not found in their current curricula. For example, it is generally recognized that decision making is a key part of software engineering, but this specific topic is not a part of the ACM’s “Software
gree Programs in Software Engineering”5. Meanwhile special decision-making courses might be helpful to software engineering students and postgraduates.
Gadasina et al. (2016, 2017) and cited above investigations to examine usually used teaching methods. Most key software engineer soft skills, such as communicative and creative skills, focus on how to do rather than what to do, whereas most teaching instructions focus on teaching only cognitive skills and acquire knowledge. In this direction educators might consider moving their attention on the processes of how and in what ways software engineering goals are attained. For example, existing Problem Based Learning approach and Project Based Courses might use skills presented here to help students evaluate each other’s behaviour, as well as train communicative and creative soft skills simultaneously with cognitive hard skills referring to the ultimate goal of the skills – ability of a team to produce a quality software in time and budget. Moreover, educators can consider explicitly discussing what students will not be capable to learn in academic settings, allowing them to be aware of potential skills and knowledge gaps and enable them to seek out opportunities outside of the Universities where they might be better learned through mentorship on the job, distance MOOCs, internships or global open-source projects.
XXI Century Skills Ways of Thinking:
Effectively Reasoning
Critical and Systems Thinking Judgement and Decision Making Problem Solving
Creativity Innovations Implementing
Learning to Learn Ways of Working:
Communication
Collaboration
Teamwork Tools for Working:
Media Literacy Information Literacy
ICT Literacy Ways of Living in the World: Flexibility and Adaptability Initiative and Self-Direction Productivity and Accountability
Leadership and Responsibility Social and Cross-Cultural skills.
Core Interdisciplinary
themes: Global Awareness Financial Literacy Economic Literacy
Business Literacy Entrepreneurial Literacy
Civic Literacy
Health Literacy Environmental Literacy
Students List of Skills Quality evaluation Ability to formulate ideas clearly Critical thinking Persistence Grant writing Academic writing International publishing Teaching abilities Educational assessment Public speaking Communication Foreign language communication Intercultural communication Negotiation Ability to convince Interdisciplinary collaboration Ability to work collaboratively Ability to find relevant information Software development Program administrating Interpersonal skills Adaptation to situation changing Leadership Social responsibility Intercultural communication Managing people Managing business Managing projects Time management Career preparation and planning Intellectual Property Managing Entrepreneurship