Education

Education is an important, if not the most important and effective channel for knowledge dissemination and for creating impact in industry, government agencies and consulting firms. Units of the Risk Center have already been offering several training programs. Those are:

• A joint degree program offered by the University of Zurich, represented by the Department of Banking and Finance together with the ETH Zürich, represented by the Department of Mathematics. The program is the core of the Finance Competence Center in Zürich. [link]

• A program offered by the Zurich Information Security Center (ZISC), at ETH’s department of computer science.

• A part-time executive program offered by ETH’s Center for Comparative and International Studies, aiming at strengthening and developing security policy expertise and crisis management skills of executives and professionals. [link]

• A part-time executive program offered by HazNETH, the network for natural hazards at ETH. The network provides a platform for trans-disciplinary projects focusing on process analyses, hazard assessment, and vulnerability of technical, ecological, economic and political systems, measures for prevention and upgrading, risk assessment and mitigation. [link]

• A part-time executive program aiming at developing the skills to analyze, assess, optimize and communicate risks of technical systems, including aspects of legal and social sciences to improve the capacity to implement and control actions in one’s professional life. The program is offered by the department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering (BAUG) of ETH Zurich in collaboration with the university of Stuttgart. [link]

The above set of programs is mirroring the distributed emergence of risk-related research and teaching at ETH. The Center aims in a first step at (1) assessing the offered curricula, (2) filtering joint qualification elements, and (3) identifying options for improvement. We are convinced that the overall quality of the programs can be enhanced by pooling a couple of foundational courses, and to offer them in all or at least some of the programs. In a second step, the Center aims at developing a qualification profile for a degree program in “Integrative Risk Management”. However, a thorough comparison of such a profile with stakeholder expectations and requirements is needed before a new educational program would be started. In a third step, subsets of skills of the qualification profile could be offered as short courses for professional societies working in risk-related fields to gain momentum.

It is the aim of the Risk Center to create a joint platform for all these already existing efforts and trigger the creation of new educational/training initiatives, particularly in the areas of social and economic sciences. In addition, a cross-curricular transparency should be established to allow students and trainees to choose the ideal combination of subjects in order to acquire the specific desired competences for their future work.