ELIC – Engineering Literacy Online

Serious shortages in qualified professionals and in technical job-specific skills are hampering Europe’s sustainable growth objectives. This is also the case for deficits in areas critical for innovation, in particular Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM). Europe currently faces mainly qualitative labour shortages, which are caused by skill mismatch, functional mobility, preference or information mismatch.

Skill shortages are caused by technological change, recruitment rigidities, “wrong” choices in the fields of study chosen by students and the type of qualifications demanded by employers. Such shortages can be observed for low, medium and high-skilled jobs. However, in Austria, Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic such skill mismatches have been observed for high-skilled jobs. A common characteristic of the selected countries is the specific shortage for high skilled technical occupations, namely engineering professionals.

ELIC aims to ensure the availability of the right engineering skills – and supports thereby a major concern of the European Commission and the Parliament (Strategy 2020 – Agenda for new skills and jobs). Additionally, to the current deficits Europe is facing on the labour market, also learning and teaching methods are changing remarkably.

ELIC was born to transfer technical knowledge best and to increase engineering literacy. It involves the following most important objectives to have ELIC realized as successfully as planned:

• ELIC improves teachers´ technical literacy in the field of natural sciences by information communication technologies (ICT)
• ELIC make sure that the motivation to engage with engineering is going to increase again (attracts more pupils to engineering)
• ELIC impacts the trainees´ competences heavily and it is assumed that 50% of teachers who completed the training will implement more technical aspects straight after the training
• Trained teachers will automatically impact the pupils´ interest on MOOCs, which are experiencing a recent upswing as teaching method and will further also increase the ICT skills of their pupils
• ELIC adapts secondary school education to labour market needs and lead to a change in thinking

Caused by the high employability in the engineering sector in all participating countries the improvement of technical didactical skills is relevant transnationally. Resources can be bundled to reach more impact on a national but also international level. Synergies can be used and learning across borders is highly recommended.

Different target groups, namely secondary school teachers, managers and pupils are addressed as follows:

• Effective training development for the MOOC to increase the knowledge on innovative teaching and content conveying methods for secondary school teachers and managers in the area of natural sciences
• to increase the motivation of pupils, representing the secondary target group, and transfer more technical aspects
• to address the need of an increasing number of interested students in technical study programmes and match with labour markets needs

Summing up, ELIC is going to increase the knowledge of engineering skills among natural sciences teachers to increase interest and knowledge among secondary school pupils.