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Abstract

What are the skills that we are teaching in our Master’s program in Geoinformatics? How useful those skills are for the new graduates and which skills do they end up using in their working life? What are the skills that the companies that are hiring the new graduates are looking for? As part of renewing our Master’s program we asked our alumni which skills they have found useful in the working life. We also asked a group of our stakeholders to evaluate the same skills for the people they might be hiring. We had a set of predefined skills, both general and field-specific, that we asked the answerers to rate based on their usefulness in the working life. There was also option for commenting the skill set and adding something that was missing. The results show that both groups find the problem-solving skills the most important general skill. For the alumni the other two skills in top three were project management and team-work skills, whereas the people who might be hiring the graduates ranked programming and writing skills above them. From the field-specific skills understanding and implementing theories was the ranked as the most important. Other skills, such as data analysis or management of measuring process, were ranked in varying places depending on the duties of the person answering. Based on the results we are going to critically evaluate our course contents and add components of problem solving and team working where possible.