SMART INDUSTRIAL PLACEMENT PROGRAM

Industrial placement is an important part of educating engineers. Most four year full time programmes are designed to complete the industrial placement during the holiday between the third and fourth year allowing a limited time of less than 3 months for this industrial exposure. However, feedback from various employers indicated that this period of the industrial placement is too short for the students to get the necessary exposure. This is partly attributed to the fact that the students (just like new employees) need the first couple of weeks to settle down and get integrated into their working place and culture. In this paper, we are proposing a well structured industrial placement programme with extensive pre-placement preparation that cuts the settling down period and utilises the time spent at the industrial facility in the most efficient way. The proposed programme is divided into two phases. The first phase of this research involves the development of the programme and seeking feedback from employers to further improve it. The second phase is the placement of students in the industries, their experiences and assessment plans which will be covered in another research.