A Study:Perceived Availability of Opportunities for Enhancing "Personal Enrichment Skills" and Its Utilization

Engineering graduates of today are required to possess a blend of hard and soft skills to perform productively in a working environment. The soft skills namely creative thinking, work ethics and learning habits (all three grouped together and called as "Personal Enrichment Skills (PLES)" in this paper) are required to a great extent by the corporate world. This study focuses on assessing the extent to which students and faculty perceive that opportunity is available for the students to enhance their Personal Enrichment Skills and the perceived extent of its utilization. Research instruments with a 05 point Likertscale and 11 items were developed (separately for faculty and students), its reliability with Cronbach's alpha measures and content validity were ensured. The data collected was analyzed using the software "Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS)" by conducting two tests namely independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test, both item wise and dimension wise. Inferences were drawn and conclusions on the perceived availability of opportunities and the perceived utilization of the existing opportunities by UG engineering students to enhance their Personal Enrichment Skills were made.