White Paper
Rethinking Engineering Curricula to Meet Industry Demand
Rather than pursuing individual passions or interests, today’s university students are selecting majors based on available employment. At the same time, colleges and universities are struggling to graduate job-ready students. Keeping the curricula relevant is especially difficult when the reality is 85% of the jobs today’s students will hold in 2030 haven’t been created yet.
To explore the academic–industry disconnect, this paper focuses on two (related) electrical engineering disciplines: antenna and RF component/systems design. Through interviews with Stavros Georgakopoulos, professor and director of Florida International University’s (FIU’s) Transforming Antennas Center and RFCOM Lab, and Larcen Reid, engineering manager at L3Harris Technologies, we investigate what universities are and aren’t doing to ease the shortage of trained engineers. We also explore how engineering simulation education, accessible through the Ansys Academic Program, is key to producing a sufficient number of new engineers to increase product innovation in the decades to come.