Standards4FutureSkills: Hack Your Way into the Industry at the Academic Standards Day

The first in a series of collaborative awareness-raising events, the Academic Standards Day (ASD) themed Standards4FutureSkills takes place on Thursday, 28 May 2026, at the Technical University “Gheorghe Asachi” in Iași, Romania. Organised as a joint session between the EDU4standards and HSbooster2 projects, alongside the Romanian national standards body (ASRO), this free, interdisciplinary event is tailored for students, researchers, and young professionals. It explores how university programs and national-level academic cooperation can adapt to accelerated technological transformations while offering students a direct career shortcut by equipping them with the standardisation skills highly sought after by modern industry.

Event Overview and Core Themes

The full-day "Standards4FutureSkills" workshop takes place on Thursday, 28 May 2026, from 09:30 to 17:00 CET+1 at the Technical University “Gheorghe Asachi” of Iași, Romania. As digital transformation, automation, and cybersecurity continue to reshape the global economy, university programs must establish a clear correlation with evolving market expectations. This inclusive, interdisciplinary event addresses this challenge head-on by bringing together academic innovation and the rigour of European standards, creating essential new links between the standardisation community, higher education institutions, and the private sector.

The event is designed around highly interactive engagement methods that move far beyond traditional academic lectures. Across the day, attendees participate in presentations with Q&A sessions, real-world industrial case studies, collaborative World Café workshops, and a mini business expo showcasing career opportunities with top-tier companies like UiPath and Bitdefender. By building stronger national cooperation between academia and standards bodies, the initiative aims to systematically embed standardisation programs at all levels of education, proving the distinct economic and social advantages of international standards to organisations, industry, and society alike.

Interactive Dialogue: The Serious Smiley Game by HSbooster

A central highlight of the afternoon session is the dedicated interactive panel running from 14:00 to 15:30 CET+1, titled "Interactive Dialogues & Thematic Games in Standardisation." Marking its first-ever rollout in Romania, the HSbooster.eu project is bringing its highly successful Serious Smiley Game to the road again for a specialised joint session between the two major projects.

The Serious Smiley Game is an immersive, role-playing educational exercise that simulates an ad hoc meeting of international standards experts tasked with a critical, real-world decision: determining whether or not to continue developing a proposed standard. The primary learning objective of this gamified session is to strengthen the core soft skills required in modern standardisation, including strategic positioning, negotiation, persuasive argumentation, and building a common understanding as a prerequisite for consensus. The game is highly accessible, with the full package available for free download on the HSbooster.eu website (here). For institutions looking to embed this learning tool into their own academic environments, the HSbooster team also provides comprehensive facilitator training sessions.

Bridging Tech Innovation and Career Acceleration

The morning and midday sessions lay the groundwork for these interactive exercises by exploring the intersection of standardisation and emerging technologies. Starting at 10:30 CET+1, a diverse panel of experts from CEN-CENELEC, the European Commission (DG CNECT), the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre Romania (NCC-RO), and the Eindhoven University of Technology will map out the main trends in standardisation driven by new technologies and their direct impact on the future workforce. This transitions into a series of parallel panels at 11:45 CET+1, where students, professors, and industry founders from sectors like automotive AI, ethical hacking, and the circular economy collaborate to unravel the exact mechanisms required to scale a promising technology into a reliable, market-ready product.

For participating students, masters students, and doctoral candidates, the workshop acts as a practical career shortcut. Tech employers actively prioritize graduates who understand industry rules and compliance directives before joining the workforce. By attending, young professionals gain direct access to European policy leaders, receive exposure to ready-to-use standardization frameworks, and walk away with an official Certificate of Participation—providing concrete proof of professional development to enhance their CVs