Approximately 60 % of the world’s workforce is currently employed by either public or private branches of the Service Sector and this value rises to 80 % in developed countries. There is also a tendency towards constant growth in the Service Sector at an international level, with people working in a broad spectrum of areas such as tourism, commerce, logistics, finance, insurance and community, social and personal services. However, and in spite of the fact that society increasingly needs more professionals who are oriented towards this sector, there are hardly any specific training plans for service professionals. This paper presents a comparative analysis about training programs in Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME). This comparative analysis was made during the definition and creation of a new curriculum for training of professionals in SSME which will be taught at the Rey Juan Carlos University, in Madrid, Spain, from the next academic year onwards. The degree is briefly described in this paper and analyzed in the comparative analysis.

This work was partially funded by the MASAI project (TIN2011-22617) financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and SICOMORo-CM project (S2013/ICE-3006) funded by the Regional Government of Madrid.

We would also like to thank all the participants in this project: experts from IBM Spain (Victor Camargo, Soledad Linniers, Elisa Guijarro, Jesús Freire) and EULEN (Ricardo Gabarro), external advisors, external reviewers at ISSIP (Jim Spohrer, IBM Innovation Champion and Director of the IBM University Programs World Wide), SRII (Pere Botella, Full professor at Services & Information Systems Engineering Department at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), ERISS (Mike Papazogou, executive director at the University of Tilburg) and IBM-Almaden (Jorge Sanz, currently Chief Innovation Officer, Retail Banking Industry, IBM), and reviewers at the ANECA Commission. The collaboration of all of them has been the key to achieving good results.

We would particularly like to mention Pedro Lázaro (IBM Spain), one of the principal driving forces behind SSME in Spain and especially as regards this project, and who we unfortunately lost along the way.

Authors and Affiliations

1. School of Computer Science, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933, Móstoles, Spain

   Esperanza Marcos, Valeria de Castro, Marcos Lopez-Sanz & Juan Manuel Vara

2. Faculty of Social Science and Law, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28032, Madrid, Spain

   María Luz Martín Peña & Eloísa Díaz Garrido

Corresponding author

Correspondence toValeria de Castro.

Editors and Affiliations

1. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

   Henriqueta Nóvoa

2. Politehnica University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

   Monica Drăgoicea

Appendix: Current SSME Undergraduate and Graduate Programs

Reprints and permissions

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

Policies and ethics