Abstract:

Context:
With 65.5 million jobs around the world, of which 10.2 million are directly generated, nowadays, the air transport sector experiences a dynamic development and must provide continuous education for high-level occupations, qualified to know how to support infrastructure improvements, set the specifications for smart building terminals, respect the principles of sustainable development and establish correct relationships for societal responsibility. The ability to deal with complex knowledge, problem defining and problem solving in aviation represent the challenge of creating new types of qualifications demanded by digital transformation. The requirements of future air transport market will imply that some transversal and soft skills will evolve in this new digital world and the solution for providing them is the interdisciplinary study programs.
The main objective is to develop new interdisciplinary qualifications in aviation in the context of globalization, digital transformation and aviation sustainable development, for increasing employability in air transport sector by using an international mobile learning.

Methodology:
The research has been developed within the project “Knowledge Alliance in Air Transport”, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme, with 28 partners from 11 countries. Our research started with a state of the art of European and international reports on labour market and new trend in human resources trends and wide consultations with relevant stakeholders from aviation. The second step consisted in an occupational analysis and qualifications analysis materialised in two reports. The main conclusion resulting from these reports was the necessity to build up new interdisciplinary qualifications for the new multi-disciplinary jobs identified for the future labour market, as for example: big data architect for airports, data scientist for aviation, chief data officer for aviation specific institutions or data protection officer for air traffic control, environment engineer etc. Furthermore, we have identified the skills and competences for answering to these interdisciplinary occupations, we have been defined the new interdisciplinary qualifications for sustainability and digitalization of air transport and we proposed new international interdisciplinary study programs with the participation of 5 universities from Romania, Croatia, Portugal, Slovakia and France.

Results:
The main result of our research is the design and implementation of two international and interdisciplinary master programs, using new technologies and mobile learning solutions: “Green, Smart and Integrated Transport and Logistics” and “Information Technologies applied in Aviation”, which provide students international qualifications with necessary competencies on digitization in air transport and sustainable transports.

Conclusions:
Our international study programs contribute to the right match of learning outcomes with competences required by transport sectors, for example IT for aviation, green transport, promote knowledge transfer and develop new interdisciplinary competences. We offer an answer to the expectation of younger generations using mobile learning and new digital learning methods; strengthen exchange channels between education and the labor market, because we involved numerous professors, researchers, professionals and employers in the deployment of all study and research programs; internationalisation of education in air transport.

Keywords:

Air transport, qualifications, interdisciplinarity, study programmes, information technology, mobile learning.