Industry expectations of computing graduates are higher than ever. Not only are candidates required to be highly skilled in a variety of technologies, but they also need to come equipped with non-technical skills -often called soft skills or professional skills. This puts a lot of pressure on computing programs, as educators try to integrate these requirements into already full curricula. Despite the fact that incorporating some of these skills into programs is seemingly common practice, little is known about what skills are being taught and why, outside of isolated case studies. In this research, we ask: What non-technical skills are expected of undergraduate students according to computing programs? To answer this we manually curated 278 non-technical course syllabi from 110 universities in 30 European countries. We then analysed them to identify trends and expose gaps. The most frequently identified skills are teamwork, ethics, written/oral communication, and presentation skills, while the development of one's own values, motivating others, creativity, and empathy feature least frequently. By providing a detailed analysis and an interactive website visualising this data, we hope to aid the community in reviewing which non-technical skills are taught with an aim to teaching the right skills to the right students. This work sheds new light on recent trends in what is expected of undergraduate computing students in terms of non-technical skills and identifies areas where more coverage might be needed.

In order to solve today's complex problems in the world of software development, technical knowledge is no longer enough. Previous studies investigating and identifying nontechnical skills of software engineers show that creative skills also play an important role in tackling difficult problems. However, creativity is typically a very vague concept to which everyone gives their own interpretation. Also, there is little research that focuses specifically on creativity in the field of software engineering. To better understand the role of creativity in this field, we conducted four focus groups, inviting 33 experts from four nationally and internationally renowned companies in total. This resulted in 399 minutes of transcripts, further coded into 39 sub-themes grouped into seven categories: technical knowledge, communication, constraints, critical thinking, curiosity, creative state of mind, and creative techniques. This study identifies the added value of creativity, which creative techniques are used, how creativity can be recognized, the reasons for being creative, and what environment is needed to facilitate creative work. Our ultimate goal is to use these findings to instill and further encourage the creative urge among undergraduate students in higher education.

Important building blocks of software engineering concepts are without a doubt technical. During the last decade, research and practical interest for non-technicalities has grown, revealing the building blocks to be various skills and abilities beside pure technical knowledge. Multiple attempts to categorise these blocks have been made, but so far little international studies have been performed that identify skills by asking experts from both the industrial and academic world: which abilities are needed for a developer to excel in the software engineering industry? To answer this question, we performed a Delphi study, inviting 36 experts from 11 different countries world-wide, affiliated with 21 internationally renowned institutions. This study presents the 55 identified and ranked skills as classified in four major areas: communicative skills (empathy, actively listening, etc.), collaborative skills (sharing responsibility, learning from each other, etc.), problem solving skills (verifying assumptions, solution-oriented thinking, etc.), and personal skills (curiosity, being open to ideas, etc.), of which a comparison has been made between opinions of technical experts, business experts, and academics. We hope this work inspires educators and practitioners to adjust their training programs, mitigating the gap between the industry and the academic world.

As the importance of non-technical skills in the software engineering industry increases, the skill sets of graduates match less and less with industry expectations. A growing body of research exists that attempts to identify this skill gap. However, only few so far explicitly compare opinions of the industry with what is currently being taught in academia. By aggregating data from three previous works, we identify the three biggest non-technical skill gaps between industry and academia for the field of software engineering: devoting oneself to continuous learning , being creative by approaching a problem from different angles , and thinking in a solution-oriented way by favoring outcome over ego . Eight follow-up interviews were conducted to further explore how the industry perceives these skill gaps, yielding 26 sub-themes grouped into six bigger themes: stimulating continuous learning , stimulating creativity , creative techniques , addressing the gap in education , skill requirements in industry , and the industry selection process . With this work, we hope to inspire educators to give the necessary attention to the uncovered skills, further mitigating the gap between the industry and the academic world.