Curriculum of a Telecommunications Study Program—A Matter of Trends?

Several trends have shaped telecommunications industry over the past few years and are still changing it today. Most prominent examples like Software Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and 5G show all in the same direction-a growing number of connected devices and increasing importance of the software. Besides that, our industry partners are constantly complaining on missing professional skills of the graduates of engineering studies. Telecommunications related study programs, however, frequently do not follow these trends, still containing a significant number of ECTS credits in electronic and hardware related courses. This was also the case with our Bachelor study program Information Technologies and Telecommunications, and therefore we decided to make some major adjustments in the curriculum. In this paper we describe these changes and the reasons for them, and also share our first experiences with the new curriculum based on the students' feedback.