Exploring the importance of soft and hard skills as perceived by IT internship students and industry: a gap analysis

Abstract

The research paper proposes a skills gap methodology that utilized the respondent experiences in the internship program to measure the importance of the Information Technology (IT) skills gap as perceived by IT students and the industry. The questionnaires were formulated based on previous studies, however, was slightly modified, validated and pilot tested to fit into the needs of the research. Respondents of this study were the IT students enrolled in internship while industry partners respondents were the internship supervisors of the IT students in their respected industries. Internship IT students were selected since they have a strong background on the needs of the company based on their internship experience. The findings of this study revealed that teamwork and communication skills are very important soft skills to be possessed by IT graduates as perceived by the respondents. Further, results reveal that there was no significant difference in the perception of the respondents in terms of the importance of soft skills. However, this finding contradicts the results in the case of hard skills were in there were a big range of disagreement on the importance of hard skills. IT students perceived that hard skills were very important while industry perceived hard skills were somewhat important. The study suggests that the university should enrich the soft skills and entry level hard skills component in the curriculum