A joint academy-industry initiative for the development of an engineering program the master in embedded systems

Engineering courses educators have slowly evolved from professionals with a strong industrial background to full-time professors with little or no connection to the industrial environment. In contrast, the majority of students will inevitably end up working in industrial environment, often requiring different skills from those effectively learned at school. The disengagement between the higher education institutions environment and the industry needs, pushes the latter to expensive and time consuming internal training programs to complement formal education and provide graduates with proper skills for practicing engineering. This paper describes the process undertaken by the Institute of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra and four companies in the design of a master program in Embedded Systems, which included program definition, management, quality assurance, lecturing, financing, workplace setup, and students support. Special attention has been devoted to aspects related with the development of soft skills, project based learning, training in the workplace, lifelong learning, training by professionals and the CDIO initiative.