Abstract. Needs for new competences and knowledge arise as industry 4.0 evolves

in increasingly digitalized production. This development entails that job

transformations and future skills need attention from the perspective of industry 5.0,

where human and machine find ways of working together to improve production

performance. Facing this perspective, one challenge is a growing need for novel

lifelong learning initiatives, to meet emerging and altering occupations for the

fulfilment of future skill requirements. This challenge is addressed here by

portraying a case where three Swedish universities have formed a distinctive

collaboration to develop a flexible (i.e. blended) course for professionals, in the

subject of Digitally-enabled production. The purpose is to develop a sustainable

collaboration between the universities and create a course format on master level

addressing lifelong learning for the increasingly digitalized production. The

ambition is to increase the impact of the universities respective efforts by sharing

resources and utilizing individual specialized expertise to develop a practical and

relevant course that can reach a larger target group. The course encompasses

industry 4.0 readiness on three levels of production systems; plant-, production cell-,

and component level; to adopt a holistic view of digitalization in production. We

followed an action research approach for continuously collecting and documenting

our experiences during the course development, implementation, and dissemination

of the course. Within the frame of action research, an explorative case study

describes and analyzes the initiative. The results highlight challenges and

opportunities for succeeding with this form of co-produced course. The joint course

gives professionals possibilities to work on cases from their own companies with

expert supervision from three manufacturing levels to address complex challenges

in industry 4.0 implementation. To conclude, the importance of lifelong learning in

relation to the human-centric approach of industry 5.0 is emphasized as a future

direction.