IT and graduate employment: INSA Lyon hosted the 2nd FIT EUROPE seminar

For the past two years, four academic partners, including INSA Lyon, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Università degli Studi di Milano and Universität Passau, and industrial partners such as La French Tech One Lyon Saint Etienne, IT Center for Science and Technology CITST, Engineering SPA, ATOS, have formed a European working group and are organising a cycle of four training seminars spread over 2021 and 2022. Each seminar will take place in turn at one of the universities in the group.

The pedagogical objective is to strengthen and promote the employability of IT graduates, by showing their excellence and their ability to understand several facets of their field.

After a first seminar in Passau, INSA Lyon welcomed 19 French, German, Italian and Romanian students last June for a second seminar on the theme of blockchain. The programme included 5 days of training: 

• Courses on technical and fundamental aspects, given by international academic and industrial expert-researchers, thanks to which the students were able to acquire skills on the most advanced scientific topics in the field.
• Presentations on the implementation of blockchain were given by international start-ups and large companies. This gave the students the opportunity to experience the reality of integrating blockchain in a real-life context.
• A third part of the programme consisted in taking up a challenge proposed by a French start-up (among Aitenders, Iexec, Equisafe and Kresus), in inter-university teams to develop intercultural skills, in parallel with the expected deliverables. The teams were guided and monitored by a mentor from each start-up, to ensure that their project was in line with the start-up's ambitions.

"We were extremely impressed by the presentations and the work done by the students", said Prof. Lionel Brunie, Director of the Computer Science Department at INSA Lyon. "They exceeded our expectations. Even though we knew their abilities, the remote context made teamwork more complex and they only had 5 days to work on the projects."

In order to create as many links as possible between the participants, despite the language barrier, the European and International Relations Department in charge of the organisation chose the Glowbl platform, winner of the "Scale-up Excellence" programme supported by La French Tech One Lyon Saint Etienne. Just like a face-to-face event, participants could navigate between virtual rooms to join a course, discussions or even share a coffee break.

Beyond the skills acquired on blockchain, the seminar also gave students and professionals the opportunity to debate together on many subjects such as the future of blockchain, the sustainability of technologies, the skills expected for a recruitment, the qualities required to create a start-up as well as the important steps of the process of creating a company.

Moreover, at the end of the seminar, 50% of the participants declared that they were inclined towards entrepreneurship and the creation of a start-up. Some of them had already started the process before the seminar, which helped them to strengthen their motivation.

Today, the students and the FIT Europe team are looking forward to the next seminar, which will be held from 15 to 19 November 2021 at the Università degli Studi di Milano in person. This time it will challenge the European students on the issue of data protection and privacy in the Internet of Things.