Today´s industrial world focusses on the digital transformation – not only in a national context but also in respect of an international applicability/tranferability. Whereas companies and organizations focus on the digitalisation of their core business processes, the discipline of Facility Management has to mirror digitalisation into the area of support processes/facility service processes. Current studies [e.g. Lünendonk 2018] revealed that digitized facility service provision is largely able to generate added value as it supports the recipient to implement optimized processes as well. From a European perspective, different levels of development in the digitalisation of facility service provision may hamper the transferability of solutions in digitalisation in the field of FM. In this context, universities try to answer the question how to educate the Facility Managers of tomorrow to meet the upcoming demands of internationalisation and digitalisation in the field of Facility Management. All partner universities have different experiences with digitalisation in FM and the development of FM-specific curricular. During this project, they want to develop whorkshops for professors and teaching staff on digitalization of service process in FM that includes modern – digitized - teaching and learning methods as well. All in all, the project focuses on the one hand to implement workshops on innovations in Facilities Management for teaching staff by using the platform Euro FM. The impact will be to merge European research in FM, harmonize it and to insure a unique development. On the other hand, they want to provide the content of these workshops to other service industries as well as to companies to profit from an extended exchange of knowledge. Finally, the project should be regarded from three perspectives: - Extending and strengthening international exchange to develop European digital solutions in context of an increasing competition - Enlarging the use of digital learning methods in the workshops and encouraging professors to use them during their lectures - Developing new concepts on the digitalization of service process management in FM and transfer it to other branches in context of the European environment aims and the digitalization strategy Aims /Tasks: - Publishing a study on trends and status of digitalisation in Facility Management (in the countries represented in the project) and their impact on future qualifications and skills of Facility Managers. - Creating a new curricular for digitalisation of services processes in Facility Management that will be implemented by all participating universities - Development of training workshops for professors and academic staff to integrate digital methods in their lectures and to include the new curricular - Implementation of new teaching and learning materials - Dissemination of the new curricular throughout the member universities within national and international FM industry networks/associations (Multiplier Events) - Possible events with students: Hackathon, summer school, long distance courses, exchanges to use the new curricular and the digital methods - Final publication: All experiences of the different events, the study’s results and the curricular will be merged and published. Deliberately developed activities in the fields of - project Management - research and development - learning, teaching and training - communication and dissemination will contribute to achieving project objectives and do disseminating planned results successfully.
The aim of the project was to derive recommendations on how digital competences of students and teachers in FM-related higher education courses in Europe can be strengthened and further developed. For this purpose, the state of digitalisation in FM and facility service processes in Europe should be determined and the driving technologies of digital transformation in FM and their impact on future qualifications and skills of FM professionals should be identified. Furthermore, the consideration of digital content in FM-related European curricula was to be determined. Based on this, the aim was to formulate recommendations for the integration and teaching of digital technologies and knowledge areas in FM-related curricula at European universities. In addition, the project consortium pursued the goal of piloting and evaluating the insights gained using selected digital technologies in an innovative teaching concept. Based on this, a joint international teaching module and its implementation in a modern cross-university event format should finally be developed in order to share it on a broad basis with European universities.
Qualitative and quantitative staffing gaps are slowing down the successful digital transformation in facility management (FM) and the development/provision of digitalised facility service processes in Europe. Consequently, the academic education of future FM professionals has a key role to play in meeting the challenges of digital transformation in the FM discipline. The FMgoesDIGI project therefore aims to answer the questions: - which digital technologies and knowledge areas will determine the future of FM and which skills and competences of students are needed? - how must the professionals of tomorrow be trained to meet the coming demands of digitalisation? The project addresses the necessary digitalisation competences of teachers and the implementation of modern teaching methods in the teaching of digital technologies and knowledge areas in FM-related study programmes. Higher education institutions have recognised that only joint efforts based on strategic partnerships will make it possible to close the skills gap and eliminate the mismatch between current qualifications and future needs.