Empowering Advancement of Wood and Furniture Sector Through Key Digital and Sustainability Competencies

In the context of the growing importance of sustainable development and digitalization, our study examines which are the most important digital and sustainability competencies for wood science and technology graduates. This enabled us to map the development of competencies at the different levels of education across the entire vertical and determine the scope and type of competencies that graduates should have. To achieve this, we conducted surveys among experts and companies within the wood sector. The results underline that expectations placed on the digital and sustainability competencies of graduates for the transition of the sector are very high, which highlights the importance of ensuring that graduates are well equipped to navigate the evolving technological and sustainable landscape, and the importance of designing educational programs to meet both immediate and future needs. In addition, we found differences in stakeholder expectations that indicate a disparate adoption of digital technologies by companies and prioritization of sustainability. We can conclude that lower levels of education should focus primarily on general digital and sustainability competencies to provide a foundation for the subsequent levels of education where students are expected to have more profession-specific competencies.