Introduction Over the last decade, higher education institutions in Thailand have been increasingly held accountable for measurable outputs and outcomes. Due to the competitions for scarce resources, they have been demanded to demonstrate their productivities, effectiveness, and efficiencies, and have to respond with varieties of measurements and evaluations, e.g. student enrollment trends, student retention and graduation rates, as well as competencies and achievements of graduates, administrators and faculty. According to the Commission on Higher Education (CHE) and the Office of National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (ONESQA) in Thailand, employer satisfaction and competencies of graduates represent two important key performance indicators for the accountability of higher education institutions in terms of quality. Although not being tied directly to the funding from the government in the present stage, effective measurements and evaluation processes on employer satisfaction and competencies of graduates have become important issues in Thailand, since they could reflect the effectiveness and the achievement of the higher education institutions, as well as the quality and competencies of the graduates. Objectives The purpose of the present research was to develop a systematic approach for the evaluations of the employer satisfaction and competencies of graduates from a science and technology university in Thailand, using descriptive statistics and a second-order factor analysis model. Results All the major findings will be presented and discussed in the conference. Here only some examples of statistical analyses are briefly summarized as follows. Descriptive Statistics According to the general statistical analyses, employer satisfaction level seems to be high only for humanware, whereas those for technoware, inforware and orgaware were only moderate. Second Order Factor Analysis It appeared that the developed second-order factor analysis model that allowed four error terms to be correlated provides an adequate fit. All the first-order factor loadings, representing the relationship among the skills and indicators, were high; except the indicators for moral and understanding of cultural and individual differences. This weaker association suggests that the items are not as strongly related to the underlying construct as the other indicators. In contrast, all second-order factor loadings were quite high, thus supporting the hypothesis that the graduate competency scale has a global factor composed of these four skills. Finally, these factors could explain the competencies of graduates from 89.20% to 96.00% of the total variance (R2 ranging from 0.892 to 0.960).

The population employed in the present work was graduates from a science and technology university in Thailand. A second-order factor analysis model was constructed. Statistical analyses were made based on 976 graduates, 326 employers. The instrument applied in the measurements of employer satisfaction and competencies of graduates was questionnaires developed from that proposed by Sharif (2006), in which the satisfaction and competency levels were measured based on five-point Likert scales. Four priori dimensions were considered in the evaluations: (1) humanware measured by six indicators; moral, professional ethics, understanding of cultural and individual differences, interpersonal relationships, cultural life, and belief in self efficiency, (2) orgaware measured by four indicators; thinking ability, vision and goal setting, management skills, and problem solving, (3) inforware measured by three indicators; learning ability, communication competency, and information usage, and (4) technoware measured by four indicators; professional knowledge and competency, general academic knowledge, ability to apply professional instrument and new technology, and working performance. Therefore, 17 indicators and 58 attributes were taken into account in the statistical analyses. Some in-depth personal interviews were also conducted on a number of participants both in private and government sectors, with the emphasis on desired characteristics and competencies of graduates.

Besides the knowledge from curriculum, most employers expected five important characteristics and competencies from the graduates: (1) diligence, endeavor, determination and sacrifice, (2) learning ability, acquiring new knowledge, learning new jobs, and personal development, (3) honesty in jobs and organization, (4) interpersonal skills for good performance, and (5) self confidence and self expression ability. Since the analyses were made based on information obtained directly from the employers, the authors believed that the present results could be beneficial in the development of both academics and personality aspects of science and technology graduates, as well as being foundations for in-depth investigations on problems which might affect quality and employment rate of science and technology graduates. These are extremely important, since the development of the desired characteristics, personalities and competencies of graduates have been the targets of all higher education institutions in Thailand.