Thomas Geydan

Background 

Thomas Geydan is an educational developer at TLS and the Graduate School, with a background in coaching, career development and educational leadership. Thomas has a special interest in anything to do with the question of how to design education in such a way that it closes the gap between our university programmes and the needs of the labour market.   

Towards IDEE 

Over the years, Thomas developed a strong interest in the question of the relevance of academic research and education for society today. He took special notice of the fact that there is a lot of research data that indicates that there is a discrepancy between what students learn during their university programmes and what is required of them by the labour market. Some companies, like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, in fact are increasingly dropping the requirement of a university diploma of future employees. Instead, they hire talented high-school students and train them through in-company educational programs. According to Thomas, this is a development that we need to take seriously: “The fundamental question that it raises is: How can we design our BSc and MSc programmes in such a way, that, instead of becoming less relevant, they enable our alumni to play a key role in contributing to the solutions of today’s complex challenges?”  

As part of IDEE 

It is no wonder then that the IDEE theme of Future engineering skills strongly resonated with Thomas. “The way I see it, we do not just need super clever people. We need super clever people who are able to work together in teams. This requires soft skills like communication skills, how to build trust, persuasion and negotiation skills, perseverance and resilience, and the list goes on. Currently, our education is strongly geared towards knowledge transfer and I think we could tip the balance a bit more towards skills. One way to do this would be to explore the option of agile or modular programmes. I see IDEE as a great opportunity to work on this.”   

Did you know that ...?

• Thomas has a background in Biology and Biotechnology.