PhD working on "HSE Training through a serious game" investigating the exploitability of new training and learning methods

The PhD student will be based in the chemical company ARKEMA, while the PhD degree is endowed by the KU Leuven. To that end, the PhD student has two hosts.
ARK is a major chemical company with 19,700 employees and 13 research centres (1,700 people) worldwide. In its production facilities, but also in the research labs, ARK, as all chemical companies, is highly attentive of the HSE aspects of its processes.

The Department of Chemical Engineering is a dynamic department at KU Leuven, consisting in Leuven of 13 professors and ca. 100 highly motivated researchers.

Project
The chemical industry in Europe faces stiff competition as it fights to strengthen its position in the global market place. Europe’s greatest asset is its human capital, but the people working in such a technology-based environment, with the rise of the “smart factories” of Industry 4.0, need to be very well qualified. The situation of yesteryear, where a person could be trained to carry out a job for the whole of his/her career has long since gone; now the situation is one of developing skills and competencies, but then being able to adapt, re-learn and be able to cross sectors and disciplines in a world of work that is dynamic and subject to constant change. Continuous professional development, the stimulation of creative thinking and the motivation of youngsters for science & technology are high on the EU’s agenda. Recent developments in immersive learning technologies are providing exciting new tools for teaching and training programmes, yet they remain underutilised in science & technology education, and nowhere is this more true than in the field of chemistry and chemical engineering. CHARMING, the European Training Network for CHemicAl EngineeRing IMmersive LearnING, takes on this challenge by developing learning strategies, content and prototypes for the application of games and virtual/augmented reality for motivating, teaching and training children, students and employees in chemistry, chemical engineering and chemical operations. The inter-sectorial and interdisciplinary CHARMING ETN consists of leading universities and industry participants and trains 15 PhD students in the areas of innovative chemical engineering, instructional psychology & pedagogy and immersive technology. CHARMING’s success is based on integrating these three areas in order to provide Europe with its highly trained young experts who are ready to help motivating, training and integrating the next-generation human capital of the European chemical industry and beyond.

The PhD student working on "HSE Training through a serious game" investigates the exploitability of new training and learning methods,including new insights from the psychology perspective, that are involved invirtual-environment games for in-company HSE training (setting guidelines) andcreates a specific HSE training game as a benchmark (validation). The PhD student uses the benefit of the multicultural base at ARKEMA (7 research centers inFrance, 3 in the US, 2 in China, 1 in Japan). There are two aspects in thisresearch: one is about the technical tools that are convenient and linked tonew technologies and the other is about the learning mechanism in training. Theresult is an HSE learning course, which ARKEMA can propose to its employees abouta specific HSE topic to be defined. It is also an attractive tool to be used inrecruitment processes. The final objectives of this PhD study is to create a specific training game for HSE culture in an industrialcontext.

Profile
We are looking for a Chemical engineer or Chemist with interest in psychology and games.

Offer
We offer you a PhD position in a global chemical company and a world-renowned research group where you will have the possibility to interact with many researchers working on a broad range of topics. Moreover, the PhD project fits into the large MSCA-ETN project CHARMING. CHARMING has pooled the interdisciplinary and intersectoral expertise of leading universities and companies in the fields of chemical technology, instructive psychology and immersive technologies, located in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, UK, Denmark and France. The 15 CHARMING PhD students will not only receive state-of-the-art science/technology training but will also benefit from a unique soft-skills training programme. This will kick-start their careers as highly employable professionals in the EU’s chemicals industry, games/VR/ARsector and the fields of e-learning and digital human resource management, as well as for teaching & scientific organisations and public bodies.