EDUCAIR · Assessing the EDUCational Gaps in Aeronautics and AIR Transport

The EDUCAIR (Assessing the EDUCational Gaps in Aeronautics and AIR Transport) project is built on the belief that the alignment of the educational and formation offers with the European air transport and aeronautics sectors' competence needs is the key for overcoming the current challenges impacting the world air transport system.The purpose of EDUCAIR is to improve the match between needs (demand) in human resources and the educational and training offer (offer) of skills across Europe and other regions in the World. EDUCAIR will identify the air transport and aeronautics needs in terms of staff training and education in the horizon of 2020, in order to recommend improvement in the current educational offers.EDUCAIR will identify the mismatch - or competence gap - between the needs (demand) of competences and the offer (supply)of educational curricula. The rational of EDUCAIR is built on the belief that there is not one competence gap, but there are actually four competence gaps. These gaps result from the mismatch of the four entities (or players) in the market and education systems, being: the companies (corresponding to the employer), the employee (that works for the company), the student (or prospective employee) and the educational institution (such as: universities or research centres). A framework of analysis will be developed and discussed to assess the various competence gaps. One of the EDUCAIR outcomes will be evaluating the gap between the number of students graduating from European schools and universities, and the needs of engineers and scientists in European industry, education and research centres, at present and in the future.EDUCAIR team has a long experience in the participation of European funded research projects and it also actively involved in the production of educational contents.EDUCAIR is structured in seven work packages: one with a managerial nature, one with a dissemination nature, and the remaining five with a scientific nature. The scientific work starts with the elaboration and detailing of the assessment framework. Follows three parallel work packages that are responsible for analysing the educational offer (one dedicated to the graduate and master level, and lifelong learning