Industrial Engineering Student Competency Mediation Model: Analysis from the Perspective of Educational Psychology

Abstract

This paper proposes a new managerial skill called contextual search, which is the ability to study the national and international socio-economic reality and which is the basis for decision making and planning. Therefore, the objective of this study is to analyze the predictive influence between contextual research, decision making, and planning skills in Industrial Engineering students of a private university in Lima, Peru. The sample included 150 students pursuing an industrial engineering career: 84 men (56%) and 66 women (44%). The age of the participants ranged from 16 to 31 years (mean age 19.77; standard deviation 4.50). The results showed that all three skills were significantly related and predicted simultaneously. Nevertheless, it identified that the decision-making skill mediates the predictive relationship between context finding and planning. Thus, it is understood that future industrial engineers can plan well if they have previously developed the context-finding and decision-making skills.