ATHENS – It’s called the Fourth Industrial Revolution but it’s really all aboug high-tech and the University of Athens is adding courses to help students prepare for the new world and demand for Information Technology.

That will include, said Kathimerini in a report, big data and drones wite the setup of the Department of Digital Industry Technologies to help develop more IT experts as there hadn’t been many course offerings for that.

The field is expected to create 200,000 jobs in the country, with some 50,000 tied to the digital transformation of the bureaucracy that will take public offices further from the days of piles of paper stacked on the floor and in boxes or files.

The new department will focus on technologies related to the field of information and telecommunications, with a focus on automation (robotics, automatic control, cyber-physical systems, 3D printing, drones), data management and analysis (big data, industrial internet of things), information systems interconnection (broadband networks, cloud computing), and techno-economic analysis combined with management.

The aim is to create specializations linked to the digital turnaround of Greek industry too, including  the smart factory, the interconnected supply network, the digitized health ecosystem, the retail sector, the digital customer experience, 5G networks, digital skills needs, and civil service, the paper said.

The department is based at the Evripos Complex of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens in Psachna on the island of Evia with no explanation why it’s there and not in the main campus in Athens.

According to the National Authority for Higher Education, in the academic year 2020-21, higher academic institutes had 794,107 students but only 3.42 percent were studying IT and 2.9 percent in the services sector, the fewest.