reFIT – women get enthused about technical teaching careers

During the seminar days, special care was given to arouse or increase the participants’ interest in this occupational profile in addition to content aspects and by doing so to make it easier for women technicians to enter this career. On both seminar days, the participants were familiarized with the areas of logistics, mechatronics, construction, and human-computer interfaces, both theoretically and practically. All of the seminar days were based on the learning by doing concept, and this made the seminar attendees not only able to see the theoretical background of the areas of the profession but also made it possible for them to actively experience these areas. This gave them a very good insight into technical occupational profiles, and they obtained an overview of the requirement profile for education for technical careers.

Seminar content of the first educational series

The first day started with warehouse logistics in the LEAN Lab at the University of Applied Sciences Kufstein Tirol. This included more of the business-related perspective of a technical education and focused on technical careers in internal business areas. The focus of the content was on internal business process optimization using watch production as an example. In the afternoon, the participants were introduced to electrical engineering and mechatronics in the WING Lab. The afternoon of the seminar was filled with things like the theory of Ohm’s law and SPS programming.

The focus of the content on the second seminar day was on graphic areas and product development. A beginning was made with the topic of construction with 3D printing in the Makers Lab. The participants reproduced a reFIT key chain in a CAD program that was then produced using a 3-D printer. The human-computer interface and prototyping finished out the seminar days. The focus of this was on collaboration and interaction between humans and machines.