What Food Safety Knowledge and Skills Will Employers Expect When Recruiting Professionals to Work in the Food Industry?

The implementation of the food Risk Analysis (RA) concept, in the different sectors of the food system, research, institutional bodies, and food enterprises, requires specific education and training. Thus, to handle the three components of RA (Risk Assessment, Risk Management, and Risk Communication), transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary competences are required. Although food safety is a fundamental discipline in several university programmes aimed to educate experts for the food sector, master programmes are, mostly, targeted on food science and technologies and PhD programmes on specific research topics. Consequently, more flexible forms of higher education should be developed, which specifically focus on food safety risk analysis and taking into account recent technological advances that can be used to assess and manage the risk in the entire food chain. The main challenge for any of these programmes will be to train students and professionals, who possess a high level of scienctific knowledge, on transdisciplinary topics such as emerging risks, crisis management, European Union food law, consumer behavior, and risk communication.

The experience of an international summer school for PhD students and young Postdoctoral fellows, organized in collaboration with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), will be presented and discussed. This summer programme has been designed to focus on specific topics (Biological risk assessment in 2016; In silico methods for risk analysis in 2017). In addition to the core knowledge on the selected topic, the programme uses simulation games and problem-solving approaches aimed at training young experts.