About 25% of engineering graduates are considered industry-ready and employable. This gap highlights the need to re-examine the curriculum so that it imparts domain knowledge and also equips students with skills aligned with industry requirements. Today, employers expect graduates to demonstrate strong academic understanding along with technical competency, effective communication skills, and the life skills necessary to adapt to evolving industry demands. Therefore, it is necessary that students should develop employability skills along with subject knowledge as per industry requirements. This paper proposes that curriculum for engineering programs should enhance holistic student development and also suggests a structured framework to evaluate the proficiency levels of engineering graduates across four domains, namely, academic skills, technical skills, soft skills, and life skills. The framework analyzes attainment of eleven ABET-aligned Program Outcomes (POs) for a program, which in turn helps to calculate proficiency levels in each domain i.e. academic skills, technical skills, soft skills, and life skills. System generates reports with insights for each student based on the proficiency level for each domain. Using student academic transcript, a case study is presented that highlights the application of the framework. The correlation analysis indicates strong positive correlations among all four skill domains. This highlights the value of a holistic learning approach that integrates academic rigor, technical competence, professional skills, and personal development to meet the requirement of industry ready engineering graduates. The framework is applied to a case study of 124 undergraduate engineering students from a 2021–2025 cohort. Results indicate strong positive correlations among all four proficiency domains (correlation coefficients ranging from 0.87 to 0.98, p 0.01), demonstrating that academic performance, technical competence, soft skills, and life skills are highly interdependent.
Jolly et al. (2026) studied this question.