Industry Master Courses – Successful Digitalisation and Lifelong Learning – Recent Case Studies

Industries in EU, UK and EEA countries are now supporting their employees with the necessary educational background to continue their learning thus promoting the acquirement of new skills and knowhow of their workforce through formal education leading to bachelor or master’s degrees. This Lifelong Learning (LLL) strategy perceived by Lombard et al in their book "The Career Architect Development Planner "as the 70-20-10 model" is gaining some attention in the industries promoting LLL of their workforce. The years with the Corona pandemic had its influence in reinforcing this model and the digital tools underwent many innovative changes helping this model for LLL to attain levels of success not seen before. Three different industry master projects are described with information on the curricula and the master projects assigned to selected students in the industries. The IT sectors delivering digital platforms to the academia had many digital platforms catering to both industries and academia and went through a swift transformation process to solve the needs of users to facilitate remote learning with interactions even in situations involving experimental planning and running of complex processes. The three industry master projects presented in this paper illustrate the use of selected digital tools for personal, workplace and personal learnings along with the achieved goals. We illustrate also how this form of LLL promotes skills in theoretical and practical problem solving, team spirit and networking within and outside the industries along with an enrichment of the knowledge base of the academia. Selected master projects are connected to engineers working in multinational and small and medium scale companies and hence illustrate the possibilities for LLL irrespective of the size of the companies. Based on the learning outcomes from these projects, some modifications for LLL using digital platforms are also suggested in the concluding remarks in this paper.