Following The Career Path Of Telecommunications Technology Graduates

Technical innovations, coupled with the divestiture of AT&T and deregulation of the telecommunication industry, as a whole, has significantly altered the exciting field of telecommunication. With these changes, a multitude of career opportunities has become available to aspiring telecommunication professionals. Trained telecommunication professionals are currently in short supply and the-long term career opportunities are very encouraging. Careers in this field include telecommunications engineering and management, public policy, consulting, research and development, vendor sales, marketing, and technical support. In responding to this opportunity, the Engineering Technology Department at New Jersey Institute of Technology developed an undergraduate telecommunication concentration within the Electrical Engineering Technology program. To keep abreast with the market space and the demands of the industry, we developed an assessment plan used as an input to the program improvement process. Included in the assessment plan is a survey sent to the graduates of the telecommunication concentration to track their progress and to gain an insight to the strength and Page 390.1 weakness of our program. In this paper we present a summary of our program, followed by the design of the survey and the data analysis of the returned survey results. We also include the steps we have taken in response the graduates feedback.