Developing a Joint Training Course for German Aerospace Companies: Cooperation and Co-Design of Customer Oriented Training Material

Proceedings of ‏The 2nd International Academic Conference on Teaching, Learning and Education

Year: 2020

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/2nd.tleconf.2020.11.63

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Developing a Joint Training Course for German Aerospace Companies: Cooperation and Co-Design of Customer Oriented Training Material

Despoina Pourtoulidou, Andreas Frey

 

ABSTRACT: 

Companies of the German aerospace industry rely on hiring employees with no prior experience in aerospace software development, who require an elementary introduction to the relevant topics. A network of eight companies formed under a publicly funded research project aims to develop a compact, joint training course for employees who enter the field of software development without experience in aerospace. The Ingolstadt University of Applied Sciences designed this training course with the required theoretical and practical content. This paper describes the methodology and the steps carried out by the university, starting with the needs analysis in cooperation with experts of software development departments of the companies. The needs analysis took into consideration the different internal work processes and compared the company needs with the subject-related study courses offered in Germany in order to accumulate the common fundamentals of potential employees. The module outline of the course was developed by selecting the content of the training covering the thematic breadth and was completed with the teaching methods and the training material. The evaluation incorporated a short training course for the target group with quantitative and qualitative research methods to assess this joint training course and to explore its benefits among different companies. The developed compact joint training course is able to fulfil the companies’ aims by combining the experts’ know-how within a stringent course design process. The feedback provided by the participants offered suggestions on how to develop further this methodology and the training course.

Keywords: methodology, new employees, needs analysis, aerospace software development.