The aim of this paper is to study academic staff’s knowledge about working life outside academia and how contacts with employers and work related learning are integrated in higher education. This is the first research report from the project Science and Technology in Society, funded by the European Social fund (2012-2014), which aims at increasing faculty awareness of working life issues at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Stockholm University, the Faculty of Science (SU). In this paper, we examine the academic staff’s relation to working life outside academia in terms of their own work experience outside academia, their knowledge about the world of work for students and their opinion on the need for work related learning. The results indicate that there are some differences, e.g. academic staff at KTH seem to have more work experience outside academia and they have integrated more work related learning than academic staff at SU, while staff at SU to a higher extent seem to think there is a need for an increase of work related activities. The tentative conclusions are that an increase in commitment from and partnerships with employers as well as opportunities for academic staff to spend time in workplaces outside academia could increase work related learning in engineering education as well as in science education.
Proceedings of the 9th International CDIO Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 9 – 13, 2013.