Faculty of Engineering Sciences & Technology

HIET Strategic Plan

The HIET Strategic Plan sets out a framework of priorities for the institution and its departments.

Problems

Vision

 

“To be a world-class institution of learning and applied research in Engineering Sciences and Technology”

Mission

 

Advance and create knowledge to nurture well-rounded professionals having creative and entrepreneurial minds sensitive towards social responsibility, tolerance and moral values; enabling agents for growth and sustainability to provide innovative solutions to local and global problems.

Themes and commitments

 

  1. Education
  2. Research
  3. People
  4. Engagement and partnership
  5. Resources

Education

 

Through a commitment to the personal education of each student, we will provide a quality of education and experience which equips students with the values, skills and intellectual discipline that will enable them to make a positive contribution to society.

To maintain and enhance its intellectual strength, the University must recruit and support students of outstanding potential at all levels, whatever their background. To achieve this, we will strengthen and expand outreach activities, based on a rigorous evaluation of their effectiveness.

We will work closely with colleges, academic departments and faculties to ensure effective coordination of outreach activity. We will enhance our undergraduate and graduate admissions processes to ensure equality of opportunity for all applicants, and to improve efficiency and quality of service.

We will review the collegiate University’s financial support packages to ensure that they are targeted in the most effective way. We will increase the funding available to support the able students, and increase the proportion of fully-funded graduate studentships.

We will maintain the tutorial system at HIET to undergraduate teaching and will ensure that ongoing support from a senior academic also continues to underpin our approach to postgraduate study. We will ensure that teaching and assessment at HIET provide an equal opportunity for all students to achieve and demonstrate their full academic potential. We will work to reduce current gaps in attainment and encourage greater diversity in the assessment.

Supporting student wellbeing is at the heart of our approach to providing the greatest opportunity for all our students to excel. We will work to strengthen the partnership between colleges, academic departments and faculties, and central services to provide the welfare support that our students need to flourish.

We will provide opportunities, through and outside the curriculum, for our students to develop personal and transferable skills to succeed in a global workplace. We will expand the number of funded internships and work-placement opportunities in Pakistan and overseas.

We will also provide opportunities for skills enhancement and career preparation for all our research students.

We will retain the best that HIET has to offer in its teaching, including close personal supervision and support, access to world leading academics and unparalleled learning resources including our libraries and collections. We will also ensure that we respond to today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s challenges. We are committed to innovation and excellence in teaching, and will seek improved ways of demonstrating this in our academic staff recognition and reward processes. We will ensure that teaching is informed by best practice, an inclusive approach to learning and the opportunities for innovation offered by digital technology.

We will accommodate growth in student numbers that is strategically important to deliver the University’s core mission and academic priorities, whilst recognizing our responsibility to preserve and protect nationally vulnerable subjects. We will continue to encourage the development of new and innovative courses and fields of study to ensure that our portfolio reflects advances in knowledge and meets the needs of today’s students.

Education Priorities

 

  1. Aim to increase by 2020 undergraduate student intake by up to 200 a year, with a focus on strategically important subject areas including computer science, engineering, biomedical science and joint degrees in social sciences.
  2. Aim to create by 2020 some additional graduate scholarships.
  3. Aim to increase by 2020 postgraduate taught student intake by up to 40, while maintaining quality.
  4. Aim to offer by 2021 funded internships for students at all levels.
  5. By 2021, in partnership with the private sector, to have started 5 to 10 new degree programs.

Research

HIET provides a conducive environment for conducting research, with state-of-the-art facilities and infrastructure, appropriate support for staff and students, and investment in the training, support and wellbeing of our staff. We ensure that appropriate measures are in place to attract the best minds from across Pakistan to engage in our research.

Our research will impact the world through new understanding that leads to cultural, societal, political and economic change. We are a university with deep roots locally and nationally. We will invest further in the infrastructure to facilitate regional, national and international collaboration, in the skills and people to provide capacity for such collaboration. We aim to maximize the cultural, social and economic benefits derived from our research regionally, nationally and across the world.

RESEARCH PRIORITIES

 

  1. Enhance the opportunities and support for early-career researchers.
  2. Invest substantially in the research environment, both human and physical (including the estate, libraries, collections, equipment and IT) by 2022.
  3. Increase the scale and scope of our central research fund to grow our capacity to pump-prime, and match-fund major research initiatives.
  4. Engage with business, NGOs and others to grow the volume and value of non-public-sector-funded research on a sustainable basis.
  5. Continue to broaden and invest in our innovation activities and foster the entrepreneurial environment for staff and students.

People

 

People are the foundation of the University’s success and the quality of our academic, research, professional and support staff is critical to our future. In order for HIET to become a leading institution for research and teaching, we must continue to attract, recruit and support talented individuals and provide a diverse, inclusive, fair and open environment that allows staff to grow and flourish.

Our Human Resources policies and processes provide the framework for departments to support their people and to respond to the ever-changing external environment.

In order to ensure quality education, continue to recruit and retain the very best staff. We will ensure that our reward arrangements are transparent and competitive.

We will foster an inclusive culture that promotes equality of opportunity, values diversity and maintains a working, learning and social environment in which the rights and dignity of all our staff and students are respected.

Personal and professional development is key to enabling individuals to reach their full potential and maximize their contribution to the Institution. We will encourage staff at all levels to participate in planning their personal development and we will strengthen and promote our development programs for all staff, regardless of their employment status. In particular, we will provide dedicated personal development support for early-career staff and will ensure that those with management and leadership responsibilities are supported to be effective in those roles.

PEOPLE PRIORITIES

 

  1. Ensure that Institution remains an attractive place to work, taking into consideration the work environment, incentives and salary.
  2. Create a policy and practice environment that is supportive of wellbeing, where responsibility for wellbeing is shared and owned by all.
  3. Put in place creative and consistent measures to help our staff to balance competing demands on their time, both within their roles and between their working and home lives, including developing our childcare provision and flexible working policies, and enabling academic staff to vary their duties over the course of their career.
  4. Review and improve our current arrangements to support the personal and career development of all staff.

Engagement and partnership

By enhancing the public engagement, knowledge exchange and innovation culture of the Institution, we aim to ensure that our research and education benefit wider publics in the region, across the Pakistan and globally. To this end we will work in partnership with public, private, voluntary and commercial organizations, and our alumni.

Working with our Local and international Enterprise Partnership, we will foster an environment which nurtures social and commercial entrepreneurs.

We will invest in our capacity to increase collaborative research activity with business, industry and other external organizations, and provide enhanced support for spinouts and start-ups derived from our research through the work of Hamdard Incubation Center of Excellence (HICE).

We believe that it is vitally important that the University benefits local citizens. We will aim to increase the scale of innovation and translation in the societal issues, medical and health sciences.

We are committed to working in partnership to increase our cultural, societal and economic impact at both local and regional levels. We will reach out to non-traditional learners through the work of HICE.

We will work to preserve and increase access to funding and networks to undertake our research and collaborate with suitable partners wherever they may be located, enabling both small- and large-scale research collaborations. We will seek to improve mobility opportunities for students, support the role of our staff and students in an interconnected world and raise the profile of our research and teaching internationally.

ENGAGEMENT AND PARTNERSHIP PRIORITIES

 

  1. Expansion of HICE.
  2. Continued investment in digital tools and infrastructure to be a leader in open scholarship and support open access to collections and research data outputs.
  3. Expand strategic national and international research collaborations.
  4. Support and expand international mobility opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate students including internships and on-course opportunities to study, undertake research or gain work experience abroad.
  5. Inform, empower and mobilize alumni to become more knowledgeable and involved in support of the wider Institution.

Resources

We recognize that effective control of the University’s resources underpins all our aspirations. The Institution will actively manage both its income and expenditure in an agile and responsive manner. Key to this will be protecting and growing our income streams by diversifying our income sources and pursuing an ambitious development strategy which seeks to fund our core long-term academic activities. The Institution will also seek to better integrate its support structures, to ensure that its excellent teaching and research is complemented by similarly excellent professional services. This will deliver an improved working environment for all staff and deliver significant cost reductions by driving out inefficiencies.

We will invest in our information technology in order to increase research capability, enhance teaching and learning, and deliver efficiencies in support of administrative functions. We will deliver infrastructure which enables all staff and students to communicate effectively, share information securely and collaborate locally and globally. With a continuing focus on training and best-practice dissemination, we aim to empower teachers and researchers to innovate, staff to use IT systems effectively, and students to improve their digital literacy for discovering, evaluating and creating information using digital technologies.

Resources Priorities

 

  1. Diversify sources of income and investment including through partnership with the private sector, commercial activities and the breadth of sources of research funding.
  2. Through the Focus programme deliver service and process improvements to allow the continued growth in research and education without an equivalent growth in service costs.
  3. Deliver a capital investment programme in the Institution by 2023.
  4. Increase in the student intake and start of new degree programs to put positive impact on income resources.