Food science and technology students self-evaluate soft and technical skills

<p>Food Scientists and Technologists (FS&amp;T) need diverse skills in the globalized food and drink sector: Food-specific or scientific / technical skills and generic or intuitive soft skills. This study determined how satisfied FS&amp;T students were with overall improvement, and in key technical and soft skills, based on their university work; and if satisfaction was linked to geography, degree in progress, anticipated degree, anticipated work place or anticipated job responsibility. An on-line survey was completed by 267 students in over 20 countries using a 5-point Likert scale to evaluate satisfaction. Responses were analyzed by the Friedman or Kruskal Wallis tests for more than two groups, otherwise by the Wilcoxon Signed Rank or Mann-Whitney tests. There were no differences in Overall Satisfaction with technical and soft skills training. Among soft skills, training in <em>Working with Others</em> and <em>Being Responsible</em> were more often rated “Excellent” and students were more satisfied with their training than with <em>Solving Problems</em>, <em>Communication</em> and <em>Positive Attitude</em>. Students anticipating a job with high responsibility were more satisfied with overall soft skill training and with 3 of the 5 specific soft skills. Among technical skills, students were more satisfied with improvement in basic sciences (<em>Microbiology</em>, <em>Chemistry</em>, <em>Processing</em>, <em>Safety</em>), and those in Northern Europe were more satisfied with overall technical training. These data show variations in perception and/or efficacy of technical and soft skill training in Food Science programmes and underline the need for separate attention to the incorporation of soft skill training into the design of FS&amp;T courses.