Defining the industrial and engineering management professional profile: a longitudinal study based on job advertisements

The engineering professional profiles have been discussed by several branches of the engineering field. On the one hand, this discussion helps to understand the professional practice and contributes to the specification of the competences that are suitable for each function and company culture. On the other hand, it is an essential starting point for the definition of curricula in engineering schools. Thus, this study aims to characterize, in an innovative way based on job advertisements, the demand for competences and areas of practice for Industrial Engineering and Management contributing for the definition of a professional profile. This characterization is based on the analysis of 1391 job advertisements, collected during seven years from a Portuguese newspaper. The data analysis takes into account the job description in which two categories were considered: areas of professional practice (e.g. project management) and transversal competences (e.g. teamwork). Considering the total number of job advertisements, it was possible to identify 1,962 cumulative references for 11 professional practice areas and 5,261 cumulative references for transversal competences. The contribution of this study lies on the identification of the main areas of practice and the main transversal competences demanded by employers.This work was partially funded by COMPETE-POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT-UID-CEC-00319-2013

Where is the study of WORK in critical IPE?

The British school of International Political Economy (IPE) has been highly innovative in encouraging inter-disciplinary work, and allows eclecticism of research and investigation, which is quite distinct in contrast to its American counterpart. Critical theorists in the British school of IPE in particular have been highly prolific in recent years and adept in introducing research on a wide range of contemporary issues in the global political economy. However, this school tends to overlook very important areas of analysis: work and employment. In order to promulgate a potentially blossoming field of critical work into genuine integration across IPE and industrial relations, we must remember our ancestors. Labour process theorists Braverman and Burowoy; heterodox economics and industrial relations research and the French Regulation School; varieties and models of capitalism; neo-Gramscian researchers; as well as a range of sociological and comparative politics methodologies have been incorporated, but more can be done. This article argues that researchers from seemingly autonomous fields can teach us a lesson within critical IPE: inter-disciplinarity is not a fantasy. The analysis, as one example, of exactly how governmental policy idealises a particular subjectivity wherein workers are not employed, but are employable, in the context of what Gramsci named a passive revolution, is a research project (Moore 2010) that begins to combine what have historically been disparate literatures. Not only can this kind of research enhance existing research in critical IPE, it must be continued, to address the needs of humanity in the increasingly unstable and flexibilised world of work