févr. 22, 2016
Since 2015, the Erasmushogeschool Brussel (EhB) and Delaware Consulting have actively been collaborating to build bridges between the professional and educational world.
We firmly believe in the educational quality provided by the EhB. Did you know that EhB actually included some in-depth SAP training in the curriculum? That’s quite unique in the Belgian educational system.
We asked a number of questions to Steve Weemaels, lecturer, and one of our points of contact at the EhB.
Can you introduce the Applied Computer Science program at EhB?
“Our Applied Computer Science program is a very practical and skills-based degree program. Our students literally work for and with the IT sector throughout the 3 years. We give our students a comprehensive training aiming at delivering all-round young IT professionals to the labor market after graduation. Although we emphasize the importance of interdisciplinarity within the IT field, we do focus on 3 specialization modules as well: Networks & Security, Business-IT (SAP) and Software Engineering.
Also soft skills have an important place in the curriculum. For example, ‘thinking with the customer’, managing software and integration projects, and communicating with technical people as with people from the business as well.”
The EhB is, to our knowledge, the only University College that provides SAP training in this extent. Why is that?
“About 10 years ago we noticed a big gap between higher education and the IT sector, especially within the ERP market. Lots of open job positions barely had any good candidates right after graduation, so we decided to try to fill that gap and it has been a great success. Not that it was easy. At that time SAP did not have any experience at all with higher educational programs. But together with the SAP University Alliance, we solved all the issues. Nowadays, we train our students in SAP R3 business processes, ABAP development, SAPUI5, mobile enterprise apps, etc. … Also SAP Hana Cloud Platform starts to get a place in the program.”
The current generation of students is sometimes called the “Digital Natives”. What do you see as the main difference between students now and 10 years ago?
“10 years ago, students expected to ‘know everything’ when they graduated. Nowadays, they seem to realize that lifelong learning is an important competence. Life is different now. They see new technologies coming towards them at an incredible speed and manage somehow to use what they need and proceed to the next technology. Also, a healthy work-life balance seems to be much more important now than it used to be.”
Involving technology partners like Delaware Consulting in the curriculum is a win-win situation for the student, the company and the university college. Students get in touch with the private sector, which is the number 1 place where most will start their career. And for companies like Delaware it’s an opportunity to get in dialogue with the talent of tomorrow.
