The Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) curriculum was designed to contain substantial practical experiences. `Learning-by-doing' approach is used allowing students to apply the theories into applications. This ability is known as hard technical skill. The university also provide opportunities for students to develop their soft skills through normal curriculum structure and through extra-curriculum activities. Both skills are important for students to master in the nowadays ever-changing world. In the recent years, there have been great industry demands for students to have more soft skills than technical. However, since industry is using real life setting, there are soft skill components that university cannot provide. To overcome this problem, university has to establish simulated environments, but this approach unable to effectively instil the necessary soft skills. Collaboration is the proposed solution, where students are sent to industry to gain real soft skill experiences. This paper presented UTP's Industrial Internship Programme as a strategic partnership with industry to produce well-rounded graduate students in anticipating the ever-changing technology.

Kegans, Loyd, A study of the relationship between work experience and occupational work ethic characteristics of baccalaureate nursing students. Doctor of Education (Applied Technology and Performance Improvement), May 2006, 88 pp., 4 tables, 11 illustrations, references, 76 titles. The primary purpose of this study was to test the theory of experiential learning by measuring to what extent work experience predicts the work ethic characteristics of students in baccalaureate nursing programs at three regional universities in Texas,