The present and future digital transformations of industry 4.0 set a high skill requirement for workers. This skill requirement calls for upskilling, a change in job profiles, and lifelong learning, both for the worker, the workplace, and society in general. However, for upskilling activities to leave a lasting impact on the behaviour and skills of the worker, the upskilling needs to be authentic, relevant, and valuable. Unfortunately, many traditional upskilling activities, such as coursework and lecturing, do not meet these demands. This paper investigates how the early involvement of stakeholders in the process of Industrial Collaborative Educational Design (ICoED) can contribute to authentic, relevant upskilling of industrial workers. The article takes a point of departure in industrial, educational research and investigates how educational authenticity benefits from the co-design process. Twenty-one upskilling workshops across seven pilot projects in a number European countries are evaluated focusing on how the stakeholder-involved co-design process enables authenticity, relevancy and value. The results indicate that both realism and applicability were obtained. Furthermore, it is discussed how this type of engaging activity can ensure worker ownership and transparency of the upskilling activities by raising the worker’s voice and how these principles can be applied in other and further upskilling activities. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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