New and elevated competences and knowledge needs arise as industry evolves and manufacturing is increasingly focusing digitalisation and sustainability. Facing those aspects of transformation one of the challenges is the continuous and growing need for competence development of professionals. In a work practice of constant implementation of new manufacturing processes, competence development becomes crucial for professionals within engineering fields such as production systems, product development and logistics. This paper reports a study of the design of courses within manufacturing logistics aimed at competence development for industrial professionals. We investigate how such courses can be designed to enable improved logistics practices in manufacturing industry. The course mode and its development are outlined, explaining the university and industry co-production of the incentive. The courses and their specified content are developed jointly with collaborating companies, and the courses are given free of charge as regular university courses advertised as free-standing courses. Data is collected between the period of spring semester 2019 – to spring semester 2021 from five completed courses of 2.5 ECTS on master level within manufacturing logistics. The data comprise quantitative data, such as throughput rate for course participants and qualitative data from focus groups. The focus groups emphasis the perspectives of the course participants and take place at the end of a completed course. Those focus groups serve as course evaluation coupled with highlighting themes of co-production and knowledge exchange between university and industry. The course concept of 2.5 ECTS credits on master level given during a period of five weeks has proven successful as regards meeting competence development need for professionals that are required to study in parallel with full time work. The results highlight participant’s perspectives, revealing that they value the potential of knowledge exchange enabled through the pedagogy of the course concept. Further, we emphasize that co-production between university and industry is beneficial to successfully design education aiming to meet real competence needs and challenges faced by manufacturing companies. To conclude, the results accentuate how the presented course concept can create and encourage conditions that lay the foundation for increased application of, at the companies, previously untried manufacturing logistic methods and new practices within logistics.