PhD Scholarship Programme: Researcher in Return of Investment (ROI) and Social ROI for Training and Educational Activities - Vicente López

Eurecat Academy trains professionals with highly specialized programs and offer in-company training. Eurecat has a long tradition in designing and providing vocational training programs. This includes experience in the creation of digital training environments as a support for the integration of all innovative training methodologies. Digital environments allow the implementation and integration of these new training techniques within the new technological paradigm and provide a great adaptability, necessary to respond to quick technological changes. To support this continuous improvement of the training activities, the group performs R&D and innovation projects related to learning technologies and methodologies. 

 
Eurecat Training Unit in partnership with UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) is searching for a PhD student passionate about training programs and computer science who would like to develop a PhD thesis related to return of investment (ROI) and Social ROI of training and educational activities assessment tools. 
 
The idea of developing a system to facilitate the calculation of the return on investment of training programs had been studied for years. There are theories developed since the 1960s (Kirckpatrick, Philips, etc.), but due to a lack of instruments that supply indicators reliably, they have not yet been implemented in practice. Currently, with the development of data science techniques, new capabilities to extract and process data from various sources became available, we can envision ways to feed these indicators that could end up making it possible to calculate this training ROI. 
 
There is more than one scenario of application of these innovations, when the impact is internal to a company, but also the so-called SROI: The return on investment in social terms.
 

Functions and Responsibilities:
 

• Leading innovative research in the field of economics and computer science and particularly in the study of return of investment in training and educational activities. The main objective consists in developing methods and tools for collecting, analysing and modelling training and educational data. Building models that characterise different social phenomena and their social impacts. 
• Collaborating with researchers from different disciplines such as economics, computer science, pedagogy, etc.
• Providing R&D support to other colleagues
• Conducting the research, produce scientific papers, and delivering a PhD thesis
• Disseminating research results to various audiences