Our 2021-2024 Development Strategy sets out what our University stands for and how we intend to fulfil our mission so as to serve our students and our professional and academic partners. The Strategy serves as a basis for our four-year Target Agreement, which formalises HES-SO’s missions and objectives from a policy standpoint.
In addition to affirming our unique, multi-faceted identity, the Strategy sets out a roadmap for all our entities and the principles that will guide us over the 2021–2024 period, with the longer-term aim of meeting our goals for 2030. The Strategy contains 32 objectives, seven of which are priorities for 2021–2024 and will be the focus of our efforts.
Our goals for 2030
By 2030, we want HES-SO to be a university where:
- All stakeholders share a common identity based on orienting HES-SO’s missions towards the needs of professional fields, deepening our regional roots, enhancing our diversity and serving as a social ladder.
- The paradigm shift resulting from the digital transformation is both anticipated and leveraged in order to enhance our academic missions, our knowledge-sharing and our organisational processes, as well as how we equip students for an evolving professional world.
- The educational programmes on offer respond to changing societal needs, particularly in terms of flexible and individual learning opportunities, the emergence of new professional fields, and the growing need for lifelong learning.
- Our graduates are increasingly attractive to employers in Western Switzerland, especially in fields lacking skilled workers; and we have become a major provider of high-added-value, non-certifying educational programmes, strengthened our role as an expert among our immediate partner organisations in both the public and private sectors and become a benchmark university for applied R&D.
- Students are prepared, through our educational programmes and our applied R&D, to help meet the challenges of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development).
Priority objectives for 2021–2024
To reach these goals, we have set 32 objectives that we intend to achieve during the 2021–2024 period. Priority will be given to the following seven objectives:
- Adapt our degree programmes in order to better prepare students to respond to societal challenges, especially those related to sustainable development, and give them the skills needed to work in a continuously changing world.
- Implement the HES-SO digital strategy.
- Meet the joint objectives for continuing education.
- Use agile educational engineering methods to meet the growing need for flexible and individual learning opportunities, and identify and adopt best practices.
- Better leverage the collective aspect of applied R&D in the HES-SO network and follow the career development principles set out in the HES-SO charter for our teaching and research staff.
- Develop a shared vision of research at HES schools so that our researchers can carry out the full range of activities inherent in this mission, which will entail increasing the basic research funding allocated to our Fund for Research and Initiatives (FRI).
- Support cross-disciplinary work among our different faculties and schools through ambitious, cross-cutting projects that combine teaching and research and address major societal challenges.