Barriers Facing Engineering Graduates Towards Employability: The Zimbabwean Context

Introduction

The state of engineering education in Zimbabwe has been a matter of concern in recent years. Zimbabwe has experienced economic difficulties and instability, leading to challenges for students pursuing engineering degrees. This book chapter explores the challenges faced by engineering graduates in Zimbabwe, with a focus on the lack of opportunities for career development and the difficulties in accessing technology and resources. The world of engineering education has been affected by various challenges and the industry queries the graduates’ missing practical skills (Zhu et al., 2022). According to Ahmed and Opoku (2021) engineering teaching requires experiential learning that equips future graduates with highly intellectual and professional skills to meet the demands of employers and the industry. Some engineering graduates have no understanding of the engineering profession at all and what they are supposed to do (Bennett & Male, 2017). Brunhaver et al. (2018) and Karatas et al. (2016) consider some graduates to have narrow perceptions thus considering engineering primarily as technical. Rapid economic growth has been seen therefore demanding increasing demand for engineering education (Dubey et al., 2019). Nowadays it is difficult as we are riding a new wave of uncertainty as the pace of innovation continues to accelerate and technology influences extensively the very basic characteristics of the labor market (World Bank, 2019). Engineering being a technical field that produces specific human capital is affected most by the rapid technological developments. As a result, the nature and composition of skills that are required for an engineering graduate are going through a big change. Modern technology is changing the skills that employers seek, and therefore, the training imparted in educational institutions needs to be revisited. In fact, graduates are not sure about the use of knowledge and the skills they obtained during their studies in the dynamically changing labor markets.

Globally, engineering education is experiencing increasing pressure It is important to analyse what it means to be an engineer in the twenty-first century and how the skills and training imparted in institutions might better prepare engineers of the future (Winberg et al., 2020). Governments are challenged both economically and politically because of the imbalance between the number of new jobs created and job seekers (ILO, 2018). Even though the emerging and developing nations have not reached a knowledge-based economy level, due to globalization, they also consider knowledge and intangible capital as dominant factors for their economic development. Thus, the current world economy is expected to create more new jobs for the labor force with competent knowledge and intangible capital and minimize the effect of unemployment on creating political and social instability. Besides, enhancing graduate employability is done in collaboration with different stakeholders like higher learning institutions, industries, and professional associations. Therefore, it is important to consider the awareness and consensus of different stakeholders such as students, lecturers, and academic leaders on graduate employability enhancement practice Shimeket and Oumer (2022). Universities, critically, play an important role in equipping professionals from all disciplines with awareness and ‘cross-cutting’ capabilities to address all the SDGs through the development and delivery of sustainability curricula (SDSN Australia/Pacific 2017, 12).