Soft Skills for the Food Industry

This course contributes to the preliminary learning objectives of the degree in Sustainable Food Science and Technology and is aimed at providing the student with "problem solving" transversal skills in the food industry. In particular, the course aims to provide the student with the tools to adopt a rational approach to product knowledge, analytical needs, legal and market aspects, in order to learn the role of teamwork with the perspective of finding ethical and sustainable solutions to production, compositional characteristics, as well as product quality and preservation problems.
The tools used for developing "problem solving" abilities will include the use of databases to collect, rationalize and share information in the teamwork. This will enable the learning of coordination and evaluation skills for the identification of possible solution strategies and their selection in terms of effectiveness, sustainability and ethics.
The sharing of real experiences by food sector operators will enrich and concretize the student's awareness about the professional role of the graduate in Sustainable Food Science and Technology from a company's production perspective. Students will be actively involved in teamwork projects that apply the learned concepts and in the elaboration of reports that highlight the achieved learning.

At the end of the course, the student will acquire:
- knowledge and understanding of the main transversal skills useful to provide concrete solutions to technical problems concerning the food industry sector;
- relational, decision making, communication and organizational skills, applying the acquired knowledge to rationally tackle, on an objective basis and in coordination with other colleagues, the solution to technical problems consistent with overall education and according to criteria of efficiency, sustainability and professional ethics;
- the skills to obtain specific information (technical-scientific, regulatory, etc.) from the main databases in the food technology sector, organizing them consistently for the desired purposes;
- the skills to elaborate explanatory reports to the problems faced, using an adequate and technical language as well as modern informatic tools.