Future engineering skills in Hong Kong and Shenzhen

Future engineering skills in Hong Kong and Shenzhen

In the summer of 2018 a group of 15 honours programme students from TU Delft, together with  Prof. Peter Wieringa (HPD Dean & Vice-Rector at TU Delft) spent eleven days in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, to learn about the local engineering culture.

Due to the partial sovereignty of Hong Kong and the special economic zone in Shenzhen, this region especially allows for rapid change (economically as well as technologically). By visiting companies and universities in this region, we tried to gain insight into how the local engineering culture is able to keep up with (or even accommodate) these enormous and fast changes.

Findings bundled in report
In cooperation with Aldert Kamp, Director of Education of the TU Delft Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, project leader of the 4TU.Centre for Engineering Education and Council Member of the worldwide CDIO initiative), we set about to prepare for answering these questions and for drawing comparisons to the Netherlands. Aldert Kamp’s book ‘Engineering education in a rapidly changing world’ sheds light on how, in general, changes in engineering culture impact the engineering education system. The book provided us with a strong foundation to find out if, and how, the engineering education system in Hong Kong and Shenzhen is able to keep up. By interviewing people with several different backgrounds (companies, academics but also government) we were able to identify several factors in which the Hong & Shenzhen area engineering culture differs from that in the Netherlands. Their findings are bundled in a report that is now available online.