Factor that Affect Choice of Career for Faculty of Electrical Engineering Student in UTM
The decision making on career choice is the most important choice in every university student’s life. This is because every choice they make will affect them in the future. Thus, there are some student did not start their career with their related academic background due to some reason when choosing a new job. This paper is aimed to investigate the factor that affect the choice of career for Faculty of Electrical Engineering student in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM).
A survey with the aid of Google Form was carried out in order to help in collect data and determine the reason that will influence the choice of the student career path. There are 51 students that participated in the survey section with 33 male students and 18 female students. The factor that affect the career choice is studied. Besides that, skill of the student are also investigated to determine the student preferred career choice. All the data collected are analysed and discussed. From the survey result, it is found that most of the student from Faculty of Electrical Engineering have choose engineering career in their future. There are many factor that considered during choosing the career such as career opportunities, advice from university and internal factor such as technical skill and soft skill of student.
In conclusion, most of the students are interested in engineering and they have made a right decision in taking electrical engineering in their study. When come to the decision to choose the career, there are many factors that influence the student. Most of the student that have choose engineering related career are due to more career opportunities and make preparation for their future career path. For those students who are not choosing engineering career, it is because they are not interested in engineering and some of them cannot find a job that related to their electrical engineering. Besides that, the advice from university also become one of the factors that affect the student choice. As most of the student have received the information on engineering career, so that can made their decision based on the information.
When we considered the internal factor of the students, it can be concluded that the student with good technical skill such as analysis skill are tend to choose engineering career. On the other hand, the student that choose non engineering career are the most of them who good with communication skill.
Group Project Title Discussion
A group meeting was held to discuss the group project title. After a few discussion have made, the title chosen is the Factor that Affect Choice of Career for faculty of Electrical Engineering Student in UTM.
Objective of Study
The objective of this project is to investigate the factor that influence the FKE student choice on career. All the external and internal factor will be determined and analysed.
Data Collection
For the data collection, we have used Google Form instead of printed form so that we can spread the questionnaire to the target student easily and get the result in the shorten time. The diagram below showed the flowchart in collecting the data.
Result
From the result obtained, there are 43 from 51 respondents have choose engineering career in the future while the other 8 students have choose non-engineering career after graduation.
Fig. 1 represented the factor of student choose engineering career in the future. From the student that choose to continue in engineering career, 56% of them make the choice because of more career opportunities in engineering field and maybe can help them to develop in the future career path. On the other hand, the student that choose engineering career due to salary and interest in engineering field have same number of percentage which is 16%. Then, the least factor that the student choose the engineering career is because they want to continue study in engineering field which occupied about 12%.
For the student that not choosing engineering career, the factor are represented in Fig. 2. Fig. 2 illustrates the pie chart that showed the factor of students to choose non-engineering career in the future. There are 75% from 8 students are choosing non-engineering career because of their interest in other field. Meanwhile, the other 25% of students choose non-engineering career because they cannot find a job that related to engineering field. Hence, they choose the career other than engineering field even though they have electrical engineering background.
Result
Fig. 4 showed the ranking on student strength with the four skills mentioned earlier. From the result, there are 16 students have choose analysis skill as their strongest strength. On the other hand, most of them have choose the theoretical skill as their weakest strength with the number of 20 students.
Fig. 5 represented the result of choice on engineering career based on student strongest strength. Majority of those student with good analysis skill are decide to start their career in engineering field because an engineer required a good analysis skill in their job scope. From the 8 student that decide to choose non-engineering career, 3 from them are good in communication skill. This mean that they might not good in technical skill but they can utilized this communication skill in other field or profession for their future career path.