Abstract:
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University education traditionally focusses on developing students' technical capabilities. As a result, graduating students and post-doctoral associates looking to start a career in industry or government often lack some peripheral knowledge and key nontechnical skills that are required to be successfully hired and flourish in that career. These skill gaps in a potential candidate may present challenges to potential employers in finding the best fit. The nature of the candidate skill gaps tend to vary. For example, in hiring a PhD researcher and developer with deep expertise in geospatial data analysis, a potential employer needs to identify a suitable candidate with academic preparation in geospatial process modeling and process based inference, experience handling the computational challenges of spatial modeling, and experience in developing enterprise quality software. In addition to deep technical skills, potential employers also look for candidates with transferable skills such as teamwork, leadership, self-motivation, time management, sound written and verbal communication. Identifying candidates who possess all these skills is often extremely difficult. Hence, employers of
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