## 3 QualiChain Architecture, Pilot Concept, Research Questions, and Execution Methodology
### Pilot Execution Methodology
To analyze the current skill level of the average ECE student, data gathering activities were initiated, in which students at the school were requested to send their CVs to the project team. The project team managed to gather around 90 CVs from students (undergraduate and Ph.D.). It is difficult to estimate how many students were asked to send their CVs compared to how many actually sent them. The reason for that is that the requests to the students were made in the context of several university courses, as well as through e-mails and word of mouth from already participating students. As such, we can estimate that the number of students that received the request could be a few hundred. To ensure the legality of the process, an informed consent form and information sheet were drafted, validated by legal representatives, and given to the students to sign. The students' CVs could not be used without a signed consent form from the data owners. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Months** & **Pilot Activities** \\ \hline \multirow{4}{*}{[M1–M6]} & Identified popular professions for the school’s graduates and performed data crawling on job posting sites to formulate the respective job market requirements. Furthermore, we generated the consent form and information sheet that were necessary for CV gathering. \\  & Presented the QualiChain concept to students at the school and started the process of CV gathering. Moreover, we mapped the curriculum of the school and generated the user requirements for the QualiChain services. \\  & These activities also helped us to generate pilot-specific test cases and KPIs. \\  & Having gathered a sufficient number of CVs, we analyzed the current skill level of an average student at the school. We also assessed the gap between the school’s curriculum and the job market requirements. Finally, we completed the first round of development for the QualiChain services. \\  & We started organizing the focus groups with the early participants and \\  & received a first round of feedback, which we used to improve upon the \\  & QualiChain services (second round of development). \\  & Finalized the development of the services and the focus groups with the \\  & students and professors. Finally, we organized the received feedback and \\  & used it as input to address the KPIs and generate lessons learned and \\  & policy recommendations. \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: Timeline for pilot implementation. 4. The curriculum mapping was completed for over 140 specialization courses (which are different from the main courses that all students must complete) and the data helped in the training and development of the platform's recommendation tools. 5. After gathering CVs and analyzing the requirements of the labor market, several analyses were performed to assess the gap between the school's curriculum and the job market requirements. This step yielded several skills that are in high demand by the labor market but are not taught in any of the courses of the school's curriculum. Such skills include windows, docker, CSS, APIs, react, JSON, GIT, android development, iOS development, JavaScript, HTML, Linux, and PHP, among others. 6. QualiChain's analytics and recommendation tools, considering the mapping of the curriculum and the missing skills, provided recommendations concerning the courses in which those skills could be covered. 7. The tool that provides personalized recommendations to students regarding courses and activities was developed. These seven steps constituted the preparatory stage of the pilot. After that point, students and professors were engaged and introduced to the QualiChain solution, and the actual execution of the pilot with early users was initiated. Before introducing new users to the platform, the pilot approach was presented and validated in more than six impromptu workshops in the classroom with over 70 students each time.