EDUCATING THE NEW ENGINEER AND RETARGETING THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM FOR THE FUTURE INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE

As the former U.S. Secretary of Education expressed it: “We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist… in order to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet.” This implies a need for Engineering Education to adapt to the fact that the nature of work is changing, for instance exists a increased need for a graduated Engineer to hold more of cross-cutting skills rather then mastery of one field.
When targeting the future Engineering Curriculum industrial employment statistics are often used, for instance for doing analysis of the industrial landscape as whole and future Engineering jobs. Indirectly this means relying on the so-called NACE-code system, the standard used by official Central Statistics Offices.
In this paper we will discuss the education of engineers, regarding how we can prepare Engineering students for the new global economy, by presenting a different categorization of the statistics included in the NACE-code system. Important engineering intense sectors made visible by that are the “Consultancy Industry”, the “Infra structural Services” and the “Technological and systems industries”. None of these sectors are made visible with the help of the categories within the existing NACE-code system.
The conclusion is that the suggested alternative categorization makes it possible to visualize that these three sectors are far more important already today than often are assumed. It also makes it possible to discuss future scenarios of these sectors that likely are able to create increasing opportunities for educating the Engineers of the future.