Bringing Industry Practitioners on Board: The Way Forward

In Malaysian higher education, forming cooperative education programs with the industry has been the practice of most universities to ensure the employability of their graduates. This is accomplished through student/staff industrial attachments and advisory boards. A private university has taken a step forward by recruiting industry practitioners to teach at the University, contrary to the traditional mode of recruiting instructors through the normal scholarship route. This is to ensure that they impart their knowledge on the skills required by the industries into their teaching. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to share the experience of this University that takes on board industry practitioners as academicians. This study employed a quantitative approach in data gathering, using questionnaire survey distributed to 90 lecturers teaching engineering courses. About 60 of the lecturers were previously industry practitioners while the other 30 were without industry experience. The results showed that the lecturers with industry experience and those without the experience employed similar teaching methods, which were the student-centred approaches. The results also revealed that both groups of lecturers perceive soft skills as important to be integrated in the teaching of technical courses. However, those with industry experience perceived entrepreneurship and management skills as highly important, unlike the other group. This paper concludes with recommendations on practices by this University on teaching and learning of technical students that can be emulated by other institutions.