Improving skills and knowledge base in European Aviation

Topic description

Scope:

Specific challenge: The European aviation sector should have access to a highly skilled workforce which can rely on a strong scientific knowledge base to be able to properly address the environmental and competitiveness challenges facing both the aeronautics and the air transport sectors. Two specific domains have to be addressed:

1.    To analyse and define the evolving skill needs of the sector and propose changes to the education of aviation engineers accordingly, and to attract more young people to aviation careers.

2.    To reduce the fragmentation in the dissemination of scientific and technical knowledge in Europe and enhance its global impact.

Scope: Proposals should address fully one of the two following domains:

1.    Regarding the education of aviation engineers in Europe, the scope of the action is to identify the skill needs in the sector, propose improvements including on gender issue and further contribute to the harmonisation of the content of the curricula for aviation engineers towards the creation of a Europe wide system. The action should also develop and share outreach material and organise events to attract young people to studies leading to aviation careers. The initiative should build on existing mechanisms and associations. The consortium should include representatives from the aviation industry, research establishments and education institutions so that the proposed solutions can acquire recognition and support from these different stakeholders.

2.    Regarding the dissemination of scientific and technical knowledge, the scope of the action is to create a Europe wide coordination mechanism gathering a representative group of associations active in the field of aviation to harmonise and rationalise conferences, events and publications. The action will contribute to enhance the impact and accessibility of publications relevant to European aviation, in particular those issued from EU funded projects. The actions should aim at being self-supportable after the end of the project.

Expected impact:

Regarding domain 1, the proposed actions will demonstrate their capacity to contribute to increase the attractiveness, quality, coherence and relevance of the curricula, enhance teaching methods and the profile of engineers matching the evolving and growing needs of the sector. The potential impact should be expressed in the light of the number of engineers which could benefit from the improvements and time / manpower savings when compared to the extra time young engineers need to adapt / train under the current situation before they can be operational.

Regarding domain 2, the proposed actions will contribute to raise the impact and visibility of European conferences and events, to optimise the number and the yearly calendar of events and enhance the impact factor of scientific publications, their availability and access, in particular for those created in EU funded projects. The impact should be expressed in terms of: the time that could be saved for scientists / researchers when participating to conferences resulting from an optimised calendar of events, the time that could be saved in the search of information resulting from a centralised and structured approach to publications repository and the potential gain in impact factor resulting from an organised approach to EU-based journals. The gain of attractiveness of the European scientific dissemination system (compared to the US or other regions of the world) should be assessed qualitatively.

Type of action: Coordination and Support Actions

Socio-economic science and humanities
Gender