The Changing Role of Engineering Education in Industry 4.0 Era

The new industry 4.0 era necessities new cross-functional roles with different knowledge and skills that combine IT and production knowledge. The universities and their engineering departments have a vital role in fulfilling this need. There are a number of departments offering these new engineering education requirements, but the characteristics of these departments and how they converge to and diverge from each other are yet to be revealed through objective evaluation. Such evaluation should be based on a precise classification of knowledge and skills areas offered in these departments. Therefore, it is important to understand the characteristics of knowledge and skills provided in these departments to determine the emerging patterns in the delivery of new education requirements of Industry 4.0. The main objectives of this chapter is to define the new education requirements incorporated into Industry 4.0, and reveal the emerging patterns and similarities in engineering education to cover this need. In order to address these issues we study a sample of 124 engineering departments.