ENGINE Model – Changing Higher Education with Industry Cooperation

Abstract

The rapidly growing maritime industry of Southwestern Finland is suffering from lack of engineers. Industrial Management Engineers including Sales Engineers have technical knowledge and commercial competencies as well as management and soft skills, which are all fundamental for the maritime sector. However, it takes rather long time before a graduated engineer will be a productive worker for the company. A solution to getting the students faster operational into the companies is to deepen cooperation between higher education and industry during the studies and increase workplace based learning following the examples available in e.g. Germany and France. The authors present a new approach of academic-industrial cooperation in education in Finland which is developed in the frame of the project ‘RADICAL - Filling Skills Gaps in Blue Industry by Radical Competence Boost in Engineering VET (VET: Vocational Education and Training)’, co-funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union.