Benchmarking Vietnam’s IT-Engineering Programs for Curriculum Design

A systems engineering approach is employed in this project to address how universities in Vietnam can best meet the needs of industry. This approach involves having the industry partners, who are consumers of the universities’ graduates, articulate a set of requirements (of skills, knowledge, attitudes) that they wish the graduates to possess. The universities then would use this requirements document as the basis to benchmark their programs and determine ways to reform their curriculum to produce graduates who have the attributes that industry partners are seeking. A mixed qualitative and quantitative research methodology was employed, which consists of the following three tasks: a) Identifying the full set of skills, knowledge, and attitudes (SKA) which students should possess as they graduate from IT and engineering departments; b) Defining the level of proficiency for each set of SKA; and c) Comparing the existing curriculum with the identified requirements and recommending ways to integrate new requirements into the curriculum. Survey data was used to analyze the degree of agreements/disagreements among the stakeholder groups and possible ways to align them; and to identify any inadequacies in having the Syllabus SKA sets taught in the existing classes, using data obtained from faculty members’ evaluations. Based on the results of this analysis, recommendations were made for integrating the SKA sets into the curriculum in a consistent manner.