Abstract:

The civil aviation industry has a significant impact both on the global and national economies and on societal aspects, such as education, employment, or supporting sustainable development. Several studies showed the aviation industry is suffering from a lack of highly prepared specialists to deal with complex digitalization issues in aviation and it indicates this will widen annually unless proactive measures are taken to create a “bridge” between academic institutions, training providers, policymakers and the industry itself.

Higher education institutions (HEI) have collaboratively developed study programs to cover the demands of the labour market and have tried to continuously improve the academic curricula and activities. However, the labour market in aviation is more dynamic than the education sector, thus there are sometimes considerable gaps between the learning outcomes acquired by students and the expectations of the employers. This requires highly prepared specialists, able to employ the new concepts, findings and modern technologies, therefore modularity and interdisciplinarity within study programs can increase the ability to understand and meet the complex challenges the world currently faces.

Considering all these, we started to carefully analyse which are the emerging occupations in the aviation sector and how can we design and implement a study program to meet the requirements of all stakeholders.

This paper has two main objectives. Firstly, to present the finding of research on occupations and qualifications in the air transport sector and the implications on designing the curricula of a master program for a new qualification and secondly to identify and analyse the challenges and results after 2 years of implementation of the study program.

The methodology of the research combines basic and applied research, descriptive and exploratory analyses. The research has been developed within the Erasmus+ project “Knowledge Alliance in Air Transport”. We conducted a study through the reading and processing of relevant reports of EC, EUA, EASA, ICAO mainly about HE and digitalization in air transport. The research was supported also by the results of the KAAT project, namely 2 reports on occupations and qualifications in air transport.

The next step was the design and development of an innovative international master program for air transport digitalization, “IT Applied in Aviation”, with support from all partners from the European project and other relevant entities from the aviation sector. The curricula were drafted considering the challenges of the current society, the emerging occupations which requires new qualifications and the feedback received by relevant stakeholders from HE, aviation and informatics.

The master program provides students the necessary competencies both for aviation and digitalization, being organized by modules, personalized after the background of graduates. In the implementation it was adopted a blended approach for teaching and assessment activities, combining learning on face-to-face meetings, online platforms, videoconference system and students’ research projects.

Finally, we have conducted a qualitative analysis, using a survey. In this paper we presented the feedback received from students after 2 years of attending this study program about their perceptions on the deployment of the ITAA master program and on the overall benefits and quality of this study program.

Keywords:

Higher education, curricula, international master program, aviation, digitalization.