School of Engineering Management (SEM) is the first school of the international level in the field of engineering, the purpose of which is to train specialists in the field of IT, engineering and Big Data with managerial competences.

The school project was originated in 2015 during the meeting of the presidents of France and Kazakhstan: Francois Hollande and Nursultan Nazarbayev. Then Ministers of education and science of the two States signed an agreement in which a special role was given to the cooperation of Kazakhstani universities with French higher engineering schools. That time Almaty Management University was involved in one of the core projects in this direction.

Mission of the school is to prepare engineers with managerial competences, able to discover "blue oceans" and to create innovations across industries.

Specialties:

1. Business analytics and global data
2. Software Engineering.

It should be noted that these specialties were not taught in Kazakhstan so far and the SEM is a pioneer in this respect (specialties were introduced as an experiment, according to the order of MES RK №385 dated 20.06.2016).

A key feature of the School is a model of competencies of graduates, which includes:

• Core qualification (Big Data, programmer);
• Skills in IT and engineering projects management;
• Knowledge in management, strategic planning, human capital development, finance, economics, basics of law;
• Public speaking skills, critical thinking;
• Skills of negotiating with companies and partners;
• Skills of commercialization of their own projects.

Each competence is provided by a certain set of disciplines, combined in 4 main blocks:

• Block of general educational disciplines (history, philosophy, physical culture, mathematics);
• Professional block ("iOS Mobile development"; "Introduction to algorithms and data structures"; "Design thinking and prototyping"; "Growth Hacking"; "Data Mining");
• Entrepreneurial block;
• Personality block.

ADVANTAGES of SEM:

• practice orientation (1 year students of Big Data and Software Engineering in the context of learning the programming get the task - to develop applications for iOS and Android, and place them in app stores and online stores such as Apple Store and Google Play);
• Students get grants from companies (attracting business as the grantor allows also solving the employment problems of graduates at the earliest stages);
• Study in small groups of 10 – 15 students;
• Full-time study;
• Project work at the end of each module (education block);
• Internship in foreign university partner (at the last year);
• Opportunity of included studying at foreign university as per exchange programs, summer and winter schools;
• Study in English. 

Partner universities – Tel Aviv University (Israel), UTM (Malaysia), Harbin Institute of Technology (PRC), Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci (France).

Grants: The University has a system of work with prospective employers, which allocate grants to students with further employment. Our programs are interested in Almatel, AlmaTV, Kolesa.kz, Yesenov Foundation, etc.

Interesting articles on the topic:

https://republic.ru/specials/data-economics/articles/learning_to_count/
http://buduguru.org/profession/39#anchor2