IACEE confirms its resoluteness to address the challenges of the future at Executive Committee meeting in September 2016.
The Executive Committee of IACEE met on September 15-16, 2016, at the Tampere University of Technology, Finland, for discussions on its strategy for the next two years. The Porto Declaration, signed at the IACEE World Conference in Porto last June, was high on the agenda. It was confirmed that, while keeping on with its dedication to leading Continuing Engineering Education, IACEE will develop global initiatives to address the 21st Century challenges that threaten humankind. This will happen through fostering international collaboration, creative design and innovative engineering, and so be a part in improving modernization, social equity and human well-being all over the world.IACEE would follow up the declaration through five operating segments:
1. Global Initiatives: conscious global initiatives will lead to symbiotic strategic partnerships and
worldwide collaborations that address the 21st century grand challenges.
2. Strategic Partnerships: progressive strategic partnerships will lead to the creation of educational
products and services that will be used in providing lifelong learning to the engineers who will
address the grand challenges.
3. Products and Services: mindful educational products and member services will help develop
global CEE leaders and managers, and CEE organizations that are involved in global initiatives.
4. Member Engagement & Communication: efficient communication tools and abilities will
encourage member engagement and lead to successful conferences, gathering together world
CEE leaders.
5. World Conferences: imaginative World Conferences will germinate more global initiatives that
address global challenges. The next World Conference will be held at ITESM (Technológico de
Monterrey – Mexico) on 22-25 May 2018: more information will soon be available on this website
Such a scheme of IACEE’s operating segments could be linked with some basic competencies that
the engineers involved in addressing those grand challenges will need to acquire, mostly through
Continuing Engineering Education.
Global Initiatives will indeed require Global Engineers:
-Who are strongly open-minded and who are capable of seeing the overall picture and of
understanding topics that lie outside their speciality.
-Who will work through service-oriented engineering networks, because most challenges that will have to be met are global by nature, though their solutions could be local.
-Who possess adaptive communication skills, taking cultural diversity into account, in order to
make teamwork as efficient as possible.
-And who also possess enough personal and multicultural flexibility, as socioeconomic conditions greatly vary from one country to another.
This will be a grand challenge for IACEE too. To meet with success, we need to find and to use new forms of breakthroughs towards more efficient systems, ensuring the best possible development and blooming of human resources. We therefore propose to put in the focus of our activities the following key slogan, or motto: “Finding and Raising Talent in our Societies”.
This text is based on an article by Anikó Kálmán, Marc Goossens and Ragna Ann Berge appearing in the november IFEES-GEDC bulletin.
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