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Abstract In the 21st century global industry, corporate recruiting managers often recognize the gap in workforce development skills from the recent engineering graduates. Fortune 500 companies continue to spend millions of dollars for on-job training and rotational development program on their newly hires. At the university level, there is always a challenge to implement the engineering knowledge into industry practice and real-life product/process applications. In the past two years, Purdue School of Industrial Engineering had developed a new MSIE-Professional Master's Program to close this industrial gap significantly. We offer the MSIE-PMP degree program with multiple advanced engineering courses and the required 9-credit hours of industry sponsored capstone projects. The list of the industry sponsors has grown from 1 to 20 major global corporations over 2 years. On top of the regular 2-3 semester capstone projects, our PMP students have been given the opportunity to work for the industry sponsors as the summer intern and/or the co-op. Upon their MSIE graduation, they are equipped with 16-21 months of hands-on industrial experience. In this paper, we will evaluate the training effectiveness of the conventional 4th year, senior design project in Industrial and Systems Engineering curriculum. The metric of the capstone design project effectiveness may include business impact to the sponsors, expected deliverables, client engagement relationship, overall efficiency, faculty involvement, and sponsor-student expectation. Besides, we will introduce this transformative engineering OpEx consulting model from Purdue to enrich in graduate education and workforce development that prepare our next generation engineering leaders. This innovative PMP educational model integrate with advanced engineering knowledge and industry-based business challenge. The outcome of this MSIE-PMP has bridged the gap and enables sustained engagement between industrial innovators and world-class academic institutions. It will minimize the common corporate training expenditure and improve the employee retention rate for top recent master's engineering graduates.
Fong et al. (Sun,) studied this question.