Developing a Framework for Sustainable Education in a Production Engineering Study Program

Given the current challenges faced by the world regarding climate change and the goals outlined by the United Nations in their Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, sustainability is increasingly gaining importance in education and industry. To be able to tackle the challenges of responsible consumption and production, societies need to prepare highly skilled and responsibly thinking engineers, who are fit for the market while also contributing actively to the transformative change towards sustainable economies and societies. The international master program Global Production Engineering (GPE) at Technische Universität Berlin aims to impart knowledge on production, engineering, and management with a major focus on sustainability. In this paper, policies of universities locally and worldwide are reviewed and lecturers of GPE are surveyed to determine which sustainability topics and approaches are integrated in their lectures and in the curriculum. From this, a framework for competence building for sustainable development in the economy is developed. The program is then reviewed and found to be teaching some of the core competencies outlined by the Education for Sustainable Development, albeit with a clear potential for improvement. To address this, corrective measures are proposed.