Embedded Systems Education: Job Market Expectations Mariagiovanna Sami, Miroslaw Malek, Umberto Bondi and Francesco Regazzoni Advanced Learning and Research Institute (ALaRI) Faculty of Informatics, Universitá della Svizzera Italiana via Buffi 13, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland maria.giovanna.sami@usi.ch, miroslaw.malek@usi.ch, bondi@alari.ch, regazzoni@alari.ch ABSTRACT The embedded systems world has radically changed since the first Embedded Systems Design Master studies were pro- posed. The spectrum of application areas has increased and the whole industrial ecosystem is changed, having SMEs emerged as major players. For these reasons, it becomes mandatory to reconsider the competences and capacities that should be provided in a Master of Science Program ad- dressing Embedded Systems Design, so as to meet new and diverse requests that come from job market and prospective employers. In this paper, we present the study we carried out to out- line the revised professional profile for young Embedded Sys- tems Designers, and we report the results of our exploration. To infer the competence of an ideal candidate, we carried out two experiments: we analyzed the competences listed in posted job offers and we interviewed a number of potential employers. Results obtained analyzing the collected data, demonstrate the importance of soft skills such as teamwork and communication, and confirm that programming, net- working, real time and system architecture know-how are in demand. Our results are an important starting point for updating embedded systems design curricula. 1. INTRODUCTION In the fifteen years since the first Embedded Systems De- sign Master studies were proposed at the Advanced Learn- ing and Research Institute at Universit´a della Svizzera ital- iana in Lugano, the embedded systems world has radically changed. The spectrum of application areas has increased beyond any expectation, and the increasing presence of em- bedded systems in the physical world has led to “cyber- physical systems”. Devices tend to become a commodity * This work is based on an earlier work: Embedded Systems Education: Job Market Expectations, in Pro- ceedings of the WESE’14: Workshop on Embedd- ed and Cyber-Physical Systems Education,  c ACM, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2829957.2829961. in many cases, while sensors and IPs acquire a larger share of the market. When the first curricula on embedded systems design ap- peared, only large market segments (telecommunications, multimedia in general, automotive, automation) had to be taken into account. Today, availability of an increasing spec- trum of sensors leads to cyber-physical systems, emphasiz- ing the direct interaction between electronic systems and the physical world without the mediation of a human user, thus stressesing the relevance of sensors and actuators as well as the necessity of innovative algorithms. This creates the ne- cessity of including in the curricula concepts typical of the control theory world. Pervasive systems penetrate appliances, commerce, logis- tics etc.; Internet of Things (IoT) or lately Internet of Ev- erything (IoE) are the new keywords. There is growing em- phasis on end-user applications and solutions, as well as on embedded software and on solutions based on reconfigurable devices, dramatically changing the current request which the future system designer has to fulfill. Finally - and this is not a minor aspect - the industrial ecosystem addressed by Embedded Systems has changed as well, with an increasing presence of SMEs (and in particular of Start-ups), so that both the environment in which the young graduate will find a job and the characteristics of this job are often quite different from what was foreseen a decade ago. For all the above reasons, it becomes mandatory to glob- ally reconsider the competences and capacities that should be provided in a Master of Science course oriented to Embed- ded Systems Design, so as to meet new and diverse requests that come from job market and prospective employers. We addressed this issue during the Future Embedded Sys- tems Education (FESTE) Educational Project, which is pre- sented in this paper together with the achieved results. The project, which was carried out within the Swiss Nano-Tera program (www.nano-tera.ch), had the goal of drafting the guidelines for renewed Master of Science Program in Em- bedded Systems Design capable of meeting the expectations of the job market in the area of Embedded Systems (in par- ticular, although not exclusively, of the European one). The project consisted of three parts. The first part focused on assessing trends in requested skills and hiring patterns both at large corporations and at SMEs inferring them the com- petences listed in the job offers posted by companies and headhunters. The second part consisted of interviewing a number of managers in a variety of environments (large com- panies, SMEs, incubators, research centers), to directly dis-