Experiences in Running a Professional Course on Digitally-Enabled Production in Collaboration Between Three Swedish Universities

Needs for new competences and knowledge arise as industry 4.0 evolves in increasingly digitalized production. This development entails that job transformations and future skills need attention from the perspective of industry 5.0, where human and machine find ways of working together to improve production performance. Facing this perspective, one challenge is a growing need for novel lifelong learning initiatives, to meet emerging and altering occupations for the fulfilment of future skill requirements. This challenge is addressed here by portraying a case where three Swedish universities have formed a distinctive collaboration to develop a flexible (i.e. blended) course for professionals, in the subject of Digitally-enabled production. The purpose is to develop a sustainable collaboration between the universities and create a course format on master level addressing lifelong learning for the increasingly digitalized production. The ambition is to increase the impact of the universities respective efforts by sharing resources and utilizing individual specialized expertise to develop a practical and relevant course that can reach a larger target group. The course encompasses industry 4.0 readiness on three levels of production systems; plant-, production cell-, and component level; to adopt a holistic view of digitalization in production. We followed an action research approach for continuously collecting and documenting our experiences during the course development, implementation, and dissemination of the course. Within the frame of action research, an explorative case study describes and analyzes the initiative. The results highlight challenges and opportunities for succeeding with this form of co-produced course. The joint course gives professionals possibilities to work on cases from their own companies with expert supervision from three manufacturing levels to address complex challenges in industry 4.0 implementation. To conclude, the importance of lifelong lea