Employer needs as a basis for developing a new curriculum for electrical engineers

According to the Croatian Qualifications Framework (CKO), employers define occupational standards
(what an expert should do), based on which faculties develop qualification standards (what a student
should learn). Without their mutual cooperation, a student's diploma has no real market value. The role
of electrical engineers in Croatia is rapidly expanding due to digitalization, automation, green transition
and the growth of energy and IT sectors. Data from current studies, reports and market analyses show
that the demand for electrical engineers is stable, with an increasingly pronounced shortage of qualified
personnel, which indicates that there is a certain discrepancy in Croatia between what students learn
and what employers need. For this reason, since the academic year 2021/2022, the Zagreb University
of Applied Sciences (TVZ) in the process of creating the study program (curriculum) include the attitudes
and expectations of employers in order to ensure that its students have the opportunity to acquire
additional competences based on the expectations and needs of the labour market.
Although TVZ has always strategically focused on a large share of practical teaching, employers want
to further intensify the existing share of practical teaching. Employers want engineers who have the
ability to read circuit diagrams, recognize different possibilities of machines using and find additional
information about machines, as well as good knowledge of English which enable them to be active
participant in professional and business communication. In addition, employers expect from engineers
to have the ability to create technical documentation, basic knowledge of IT infrastructure, as well as
knowledge of programming languages that are in line with the specific requirements of their companies.
According employers attitudes an electrical engineer must be able to deal with crisis situations, move
away from the everyone known theory and their narrow profession and solve the problem in a new and
creative way. In this sense, employers offer cooperation to TVZ through guest lectures by their experts
and ensuring longer student internships during which students will really gain some concrete experience.
After reviewing existing learning outcomes at the Electrical Engineering Department, employers
conclude that they are mostly over ambitiously defined and need to be set more realistically. Employers
base this view on their experience that after graduating, an engineer, for example, is not capable for
independently developing solutions or managing and supervising a production facility without at least 3
5 years of work experience. The Committee of Electrical Engineering Department has incorporated the
greatest possible extent opinions of employers into process of creation of new curriculum for their
undergraduate and graduate study for the next academic year and corrected majority of unrealistically
set learning outcomes. Whether employers will recognize entered changes introduced in the curriculum
also as an improvement in the study quality and students acquired competencies will be tested in the
next wave of research, which is planned to be conducted in the academic year 2026/2027.