The rapid technological advances have transformed the complex business environment with impact on processes, products and services' life cycles. All of these changes lead to significant transformations also in the labour market's requirements for industrial engineers' graduates' skills. In this paper, the European Commission (EC) definition of skills is followed, which understands it as the broad set of knowledge, abilities and characteristics reflecting an individual's performance and behavioural characteristics, which demonstrates if a person is able to adequately perform a given task. This study aims to analyse and compare different perspectives (teachers, students and industrial professionals) about the essential skills for current Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) graduates. The study is based on data collected through a survey administered to teachers and students from the IEM programme of a Portuguese University, as well as to some industry professionals working with the programme's final year students (internship supervisors). The data was statistically analysed resorting to descriptive statistics and non-parametric hypothesis tests. Overall it was possible to conclude that for most of the skills under analysis, the three groups of actors hold different perspectives on their importance for IEM graduates. Furthermore, teachers and students attributed more importance to transversal skills, while industrial professionals attached more importance to scientific and technological skills. On the other hand, for industry professionals, transversal skills are the least important, while teachers and students once again converged in their perspectives and considered engineering and practice as the least important skills. The paper provides a contribution for knowledge development around IEM skills, and offers insights for their improvement, notably through a closer collaboration between the higher education institutions and the industry.