Competencies driven by Lean Education: System-thinking, sustainability and ethics

Abstract

Lean Education (LE) derives from Lean Thinking, a paradigm that emerged in the industry and nowadays was spread to all industries and services, including the education services, not only as a way to improve these services but, more important, as a pedagogical platform to innovate the learners curricula and better prepare them to professional world. With Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, Lean Thinking principles are more needed than ever in order to train people so they know how to serve better “clients” but in a “lean way”, i.e., delivering the product, just using the resources needed to produce it, respecting people and the environment. To achieve this, it is fundamental to know the whole and not just a part, having system-thinking competencies. Lean Education is a need in all professionals, from the line operator to the top management administrators because lean solutions must be found in all activities people do. Advocating Lean consumption is also part of this training. This is why teaching Lean is so important, teaching and learning Lean should call for both content and competency mastery. In order to acquire these competencies, Lean Thinking cannot be successfully taught by traditional expositive methods. Based on Toyota Education Model and Training within Industry (TWI) origins, students need “learning by doing” approaches such as project-based, serious games, hands-on among others to internalize such principles into an industrial environment. In the workshop proposed, participants will have the opportunity to discuss the current professionals' needs and competencies in teams. Each team will discuss some topics such as weaknesses of current problem solving strategies (Content vs competencies, Holistic vs compartmentalized, passive vs active learning methodologies, link to industry,…); Lean Engineering concept, principles, tools and system-thinking, ethics and sustainability competencies. Then, some scenarios of professional competenci