Curricula Database — What does your Curricula look like? Part I

by: Duarte Oliveira

ESTIEM’s Vision and what do we stand for

As ESTIEM, our vision is to “Connect Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) Students within an IEM Europe”. With this in mind, ESTIEM for many years became proficient in delivering many services to IEM Students, across a great variety of fields and expertises. However, one area was missing, a solid infrastructure of knowledge and deliverables: Connecting IEM Students and ESTIEM’s stakeholders within the SCIENCE of IEM, meaning, connecting everyone around us on the purpose of improving our curricula, skills and job opportunities around IEM. For this purpose, and many more, the Curricula Database was created last year in ESTIEM.

Explanatory Diagram on how ESTIEM interacts for its IEM Europe, 28th Board of ESTIEM Strategy

Initial beginnings and Purposes

For quite some time, the idea of having a complete database of the Curricula of IEM was laying around in the heads of ESTIEMers, specifically in the head of the Vice Presidents of Education. However, it was only In 2018, through a requirement e-mail, that the 29th Board decided to gather together all the Curricula ESTIEM Local Groups were recruiting from their members, so that we could understand which Local Groups were clearly IEM focused and which ones were not. Therefore, in a macro perspective, the database was being created for the sole purpose of monitoring our members, a principal of internal growth, of cohesion and maintaining the structure. Despite this advantage, the project was not reaching its full potential: to be a platform of knowledge, competitive advantage for ESTIEM and a hub for research across Europe. That is where the 2020 advancements came in, to give structure to this research and platform objective.

In 2019, within a meeting with one of our main Institutional Partners, European Academy for Industrial Management (AIM) (https://europe-aim.eu/), lights were shed on this matter of treated information. Among the coffee breaks, some questions from researchers and professors came into the direction of ESTIEM: “Does ESTIEM have the percentage of students satisfied with their education in Germany?”, “Does ESTIEM have the area Spain focuses the most in their curricula?” or even “What is the job category that IEM Students take the most after their bachelors and masters degree?”. With this in mind, ESTIEM understood: we needed to step up our tools, our knowledge and our purpose, being the ones connecting all these questions, in an analytical way, with research and platforms in sight.

AIM Kick-Off Meeting November 2019, Bari

After many months of procrastination and disbelief, January of 2020 came in, and so did the solutions. In a never ending meeting with professors from University of Minho, Rui Lima and Diana Mesquita, ESTIEM was able to define the correct frameworks (taxonomy) to classify the subjects of the various curriculas, understand the business value it has for many stakeholders and define the fastest minimum viable product (MVP). After that meeting, ESTIEM was able to already classify 15+ Bachelors Curricula with high scientific precision and was able to already engage with the Portuguese Universities to hand in the first marketing report.

Why is ESTIEM good at doing this?

Regardless of the purposes and motivations, one question still arises: are we that good at doing this and does Europe need ESTIEM to do this? The answer is quite simple: YES! However, the reasons are not that straightforward, but here they are:

1. Currently, ESTIEM is the only Student Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) in Europe to do Education and Career Research on this scientific level of taxonomy detail, delivering ESTIEM the business and technology advantage towards many stakeholders (we are the first ones to be contacted);
2. The target group of ESTIEM, IEM Students, is narrow enough to be able to develop tailored frameworks only for IEM to classify our Careers and Education, something not as easy as if it was done in larger Student NGOs, with multiple focuses;
3. ESTIEM is the biggest international body regarding Industrial Engineering and Management, only rivaling with IISE from the USA, putting ESTIEM in a great position of detaining a great deal of data to process and take learnings from, something not possible to local or national bodies, such as statistics institutions or even universities;
4. For this project ESTIEM is being supported technically by professors from University of Minho, improving every month together with us, the framework used to categorize the subjects in the curricula, allowing ESTIEM to always be updated with the state of the art knowledge on the field;
5. ESTIEM has many industrial and consultancy companies looking after our IEM Students and ESTIEM members for recruitment opportunities, many times looking for people proficient in data visualization and data processing. Hence, with this kind of projects, ESTIEM is shaping the future generations to be ready for the hottest job titles in existence, making it an attractive field for IEM Students to work in ESTIEM;

Value Proposition and the 6 Goals it aims to achieve

As every tool that is built, it always contributes for bigger organizational and business goals. The Curricula Database is no exception, being one of the most complete examples of projects that fulfills everyone that touches it, making it more than just a tool: a living ecosystem. After various iterations of the project, the team came up with the following 6 goals that encompass different parts of the vision we have for it:

1. Be able to discover the true composition of IEM — with the database, ESTIEM aims to fully understand what IEM is and demystify all the questions still going on air on this topic;
2. Deliver powerful insights to universities and industry — ESTIEM aims to provide recommendations and insights through data visualization of the ‘as is’ situation in each country and the whole Europe, so that Universities and Companies can improve various aspects of their Curricula and In-House Training Systems for Advanced Skills Needed, respectively;
3. Provide IEM Students a Digital Platform to Generate Discussions — ESTIEM also wants to democratize two aspects: the specific knowledge and skills of each curricula and improve the critical thinking and discussions around Education, both towards IEM Students. Thus, ESTIEM wants to deliver as much transparency as possible regarding IEM Curricula so that our students are empowered to take better decisions and also be able to improve locally their degrees through European Benchmark with each other;
4. Improve Decision-Making for the ESTIEM Board — the ESTIEM Board is also now equipped enough to know what each of its members study, thus, knowing what events and experiences to provide in each country depending on the studies they have. This is yet to be fully implemented, but definitely a game-changer in decision making processes for NGOs;
5. Contribute Scientifically to Europe — ESTIEM is continuously producing information useful enough for research papers, thus, being able to position ESTIEM in important Conferences and Journals that seek new information about IEM and Education and Career in general;
6. Be closer to the European Commission — ESTIEM gets closer to the EU by providing insights in the current situation of the Educational Offers of each country, something valuable for the long-term agenda of the EU;

In conclusion, the Curricula Database has two types of goals: tactical (internal improvement of ESTIEM and its procedures) and strategic/external (focused on the value creation and improvement of the stakeholder experience with ESTIEM). As an ecosystem, every goal has to happen at the same time, since they are connected and depend on each other for success.

If we now focus on what ESTIEM can offer with the tool and by pursuing the above mentioned goals, we reach the classic question that always needs to be addressed when creating new products: “What is your Value Proposition with this, ESTIEM?”. This was a question for quite some time asked by many stakeholders like European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) (https://www.sefi.be/), and why would someone like to collaborate with us. Thereupon, we have the following compilation of topics that together make a strong value proposition:

1. ESTIEM can assist Universities and Companies to improve their Training and Educational Systems;
2. ESTIEM can provide detailed overview of the subjects distribution of the various curricula in Europe, allowing Conferences and Journals in Europe to improve their research portfolio as well;
3. ESTIEM can provide power to students by compiling the knowledge in a single platform.

SEFI Conference 2019, where ESTIEM got great contacts for the Development of the Database

With this database, ESTIEM can establish itself as a respected stakeholder capable of providing change and opinions to various European Institutions.

If you want to know more about the next steps of this project, don’t hesitate to contact the creator (Duarte.Oliveira@estiem.org) or the Board of ESTIEM ( board@estiem.org ).

In the second part of this story, you’ll be able to see the taxonomy we use to classify the curricula and the long-term objectives ESTIEM has for this area! Stay tuned!