"Don't Be Afraid, Just Learn": Insights from Industry Practitioners to Prepare Software Engineers in the Age of Generative AI
This work offers empirical guidance for educators to prepare software engineering students for industry demands in the age of generative AI, though it is incremental as it synthesizes existing practitioner insights.
The study surveyed 51 industry practitioners to address the gap between university curricula and industry needs due to generative AI integration, finding that GenAI demands new skills like prompting while reinforcing soft-skills and traditional competencies, and providing actionable recommendations for academia.
Although tension between university curricula and industry expectations has existed in some form for decades, the rapid integration of generative AI (GenAI) tools into software development has recently widened the gap between the two domains. To better understand this disconnect, we surveyed 51 industry practitioners (software developers, technical leads, upper management, \etc) and conducted 11 follow-up interviews focused on hiring practices, required job skills, perceived shortcomings in university curricula, and views on how university learning outcomes can be improved. Our results suggest that GenAI creates demand for new skills (\eg prompting and output evaluation), while strengthening the importance of soft-skills (\eg problem solving and critical thinking) and traditional competencies (\eg architecture design and debugging). We synthesize these findings into actionable recommendations for academia (\eg how to incorporate GenAI into curricula and evaluation redesign). Our work offers empirical guidance to help educators prepare students for modern software engineering environments.