Faculty professionalization through industry sponsored projects in Austrian VET colleges focused on chemistry

Austrian VET school and college students can work on industry sponsored projects in their last two semester of study, this include also chemistry and chemical engineering students. In 2011 from 22,600 teaching staff 8,000 had been teaching engineering subjects, 250 teaching chemistry and related subjects. All teaching staff is academics trained at technical universities, who had been working in industry at least for 4 years. Diploma projects are supervised by professors. To rely on the quality standards had been published already in 1999, again in 2002. More than 4000 projects are registered with htl-innovativ, an Austrian initiative listing diploma projects, 205 in the fields of chemistry. Relying on these data and on other detailed information about diploma projects in Austrian VET colleges in the last fifteen years the professionalization of the teaching staff as coaches with a focus on chemistry is studied. As in 2016 changed graduation examination rules with e From the year 2016 on changed graduation examination rules will take place at the Austrian Upper level secondary technical and vocational schools with emphasis on e. g. project work, and therefore, the professionalization of teaching staff is an important issue.