Preparing and educating the Arab Qatari engineer of 2030

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of adapting Engineering Education to a changing situation in Qatar, a small country that is part of the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council. It presents the framework for a national project planned to take place in the State of Qatar during the 2010/11 academic year. Over the past few years, several professional organizations started reviewing the issue of preparing engineers for the future. Examples of these are: "The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century", and "Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century" by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in the US, and the "Educating Engineers for the 21st Century" by the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK. These reports analyzed the changes that are taking place in the engineering profession in order to anticipate how the future will and should look like. Based on that, recommendations for action were given to define the characteristics of the future engineer. In Qatar, the Qatari government has recently announced the country vision for 2030 (Qatar National Vision 2030, QNV2030). The vision relies on four pillars, namely Human development, economic development, environmental development, and social development. As the economy and development of Qatar relies heavily on oil and gas and as there is an ambitious plan in place to move to a knowledge based economy, it is believed that engineers will need to play a key role in achieving QNV 2030, and that it will be important to take into account some specific characteristics of the Qatari engineering profession, such as the high proportion (60%) of female engineers in the College of Engineering of the only National university in Qatar i.e. Qatar University. This paper describes the guiding principles in doing the study, developing the methodologies that will be used and ensuring that the expected outcomes are realized.