Toward a sustainable educational engineer archetype through Industry 4.0

In the last decade, a shift toward Sustainable Development (SD) in engineering has started in the educational and occupational framework. Therefore, the need to rethink the professional figures of an engineer has become a necessity. Unfortunately, neither a formal methodology to define a standard engineer archetype nor procedural methods to evaluate such archetypes’ contribution to SD are investigated. This paper bridges the first gap by proposing a general methodology to define specific engineer archetypes as technical competences from educational - Semi Structured Intended Learning Outcomes (SS-ILOs) - and occupational - European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) - frameworks. The second gap is addressed by a procedural method based on indirect mapping of the identified archetypes onto United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs). Since Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is the working environment of future engineers and has a promising potential to achive SDGs, I4.0 technologies influences on SDGs are used as a bridge to evaluate sustainability of the defined enigineer archetypes. Finally, we provide the application of our proposed methodology to the Industrial engineering case study. The results show that significant limitations toward sustainability remain open challenges. However, the intrinsic nature of the industrial engineer is confined to some specific goals, and a characteristic signature on sustainability emerged.