Future Trends of Skills Demands in Qatar

The majority of stakeholders (industry, faculty, and students) expected changes in the demand of competencies set of engineering graduates in Qatar in the future (both for 2022 and for 2030). In particular, qualitative feedback from stakeholders highlighted the following set to be of higher demand: more demanded by various stakeholders—ICT skills, management, leadership, entrepreneurship, innovation,

Table 7.23 Lowest satisfaction levels on competencies and skills

Least 7 Skills and competencies Satisfaction
Rankin e	Industry	Mea n	Students	Mea n	Faculty	Mean
Least 1		3.00		3.36		2.98
Least 2		3.00		3.36		3.00
Least 3		3.11		3.40		3.08
Least 4		3.13		3.40		3.10
Least 5		3.13		3.43		3.18
Least 6		3.18		3.46		3.20
Least 7		3.18		3.46		3.22

Highlights in yellow indicate repletion of the competency in the three categories, highlights in red indicate repetition in 2 categories, and highlights in green indicate only one repletion

problem-solving, research, practical skills, communications, teamwork, and decision-making.

In quantitative analysis, overall, all temporal gaps for all stakeholders (industry, faculty, and students) were on the positive side, indicating a higher importance or demand of engineering graduates competencies in the future (2030) than currently. All temporal gaps recorded a statistically significant difference, and the gaps were relatively higher for the expert group (industry and faculty) than those reported by students. Industry in general scored higher means than faculty (faculty scored higher than students) on the future (2030) importance of practical skills, and on the majority of Dimension 2 (cognition, thinking, and mental), Dimension 3 (professional and interpersonal skills), and Dimension 4 (business and management); however, no statistically significant difference was detected between faculty and industry.

It is worth mentioning that analysis of the top temporal gaps reported by the expert group (industry and faculty) has shown tendency to value the importance of iKBE-oriented competencies higher in the future than other evaluated skills (temporal gaps were top highest for these competencies). Expert group in particular reported highest temporal gaps in highly correlated iKBE competencies such as innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership (and related attributes such as decision-making, adaptability, and system thinking), management, interdisciplinary knowledge, multidisciplinary knowledge, design, and problem-solving (see Table 7.24 for further details).

Table 7.24 Stakeholders temporal gaps

Temporal gap
Industry	Faculty
	Decision making (0.65)
Leadership (0.46]
	Adaptability (0.56)
Interdisciplinary (0.43]
Multidisciplinary (0.36)
	Problem solving (0.49)
Design/ Decision making (0.34)	System thinking (0.49)

Highlights in yellow for repletion in two categories