| Scope and method of study. The objective of the research project was to model a methodology or sequential approach for measuring the judgments of manufacturing companies for comparison to judgments made by academia and industrial engineering students at the graduate level. The significance of the alignment of graduate-level engineers' technical, managerial, social, and political skills with selected stakeholders could then be determined. The project was designed and executed using a method for conducting observational, descriptive survey research, because it was important to develop an understanding about the current status of goals alignment for a representative sample of stakeholders drawn from expert panels of manufacturers [representing the federal and commercial sectors], industrial engineering academicians, and from a classroom-based population of graduate-level and undergraduate-level industrial engineering students. The expert manufacturing panel provided the input to the nominal group technique and affinity diagramming processes. A decision hierarchy was then determined and used to construct a written survey instrument based upon Thomas L. Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process method. Surveys provided the comparative judgment data. Hypotheses were drawn to test the significance of the respondents' comparative judgments.;Findings and conclusions. Priority judgments were determined for the sample manufacturing, academic and student cohorts. Hypotheses were tested using the Games-Howell methodology to provide results robust to assumptions of equal variance. The research could not find significant evidence to refute the hypotheses of no difference for the academic, manufacturing, and student populations between the technical, managerial, social, and political characteristics, except in two cases: the academic/technical and undergraduate student/technical and the academic/managerial and undergraduate student/managerial. Alignment in this research was as a family-wise statistical comparison of the judgments of manufacturing companies to those judgments made by industrial engineering academia and industrial engineering students at the senior and graduate level. The precise level of alignment is not determined nor was this a sub-objective of the research. It is, then, concluded that the manufacturing, academic and student sample populations are approximately coincident in their qualitative assessment of the needs for graduate-level industrial engineers. |
