UrBIOfuture aims to bridge this gap between the professional profiles demanded by the bioindustry sector and the existing educational offer by identifying education needs and career opportunities in the European bio-based sector, involving stakeholders, and setting the path for the industry to attract qualified talent. The project objectives are: (1) To map completed and ongoing programs addressing curricula that involve bio-based activities; (2) To foster the interaction and alignment among educational and research institutions and industry; (3) To identify current education and professional gaps and skills mismatch in the bio-based field; and (4) To provide the bio-based industry and sector with a basis for promoting careers in the bio-based sector, the so-called “UrBIOfuture experience”.
The main conclusions we achieved with the project implementation are:
•European Complexity: the complexity of Europe regarding different legal frameworks and educational systems is a challenge in order to implement common activities to boost careers, educational programmes and research activities. It’s important to create networks to facilitate the educational collaboration of those regions with similar industries, and to build bridges between the different industries in order to facilitate careers and research activities.
•Improve research and innovation competences: The industry identify a GAP in terms of knowledge transfer from the laboratories to the industry. It’s important to improve innovation competences, which means that we should prepare the workforce, especially the ones doing research, to think in the final use of their research results.
•Foster education and industry collaboration: it’s important to strength the connection between educational institutions at all levels with the industry needs and the entire value-chain, so we should increase the collaboration of the industry in the process.
•New educational methodologies: good competence programming should combine different types of methodological strategies and practice in order to overcome the challenge of comprehensive teaching with guarantees of success. Some of the methodologies to be implemented are laboratory practices, field work, simulation, case studies, problem-based learning, supervised projects, etc..
•Soft skills and cross-sectorial skills: It’s important for the professionals to be open-minded to new knowledge and point of views, as well as cultural differences, in order to achieve the challenges of collaboration with other regions, industries and professionals with different educational background.
•Collaboration: University-Industry collaboration is a necessary condition for innovation and active interaction between the two agents is essential for any region to achieve greater competitiveness.
Results:
https://www.urbiofuture.eu/(opens in new window)
