AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE IMPROVEMENT OF GRADUATE ATTRIBUTES WITHIN THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSITY SECTOR

Abstract

In Egypt earlier this century, the government recognised the importanceof reforming its higher education sector to meet the challenges of thenew era. One of these challenges was Egyptian employers' dissatisfactionwith graduate attributes which were described as not meeting employmentdemands. To address such a problem, the Egyptian government, through areform strategy, initiated a number of projects which among other thingsaimed to improve graduates' readiness for the labour market and thusreduce the skills gap. Yet, with all the initiatives achieved to datethe problem still persists. This research has sought to study the skillsgap problem in depth but within the scope of computer engineeringundergraduate studies. It aims to understand the contextual factorsaffecting the effective implementation of graduate attributes in taughtcourses in Egyptian universities. To do this, a number of questions wereposed, using semi-structured interviews, to a purposive sample ofacademics and graduates belonging to two different computer engineeringundergraduate programmes; one private and the other public. To ensurethe validity of the data, more information was collected from Egyptianemployers as well as the documents that represent the differenteducational policies and practices implemented in both private andpublic programmes of study. Through thematic data analysis and byapplying complexity theory as a conceptual framework, the studyidentified the different contextual factors that affected Egyptianacademics' performance when teaching and learning graduate attributes incomputer engineering undergraduate courses.