Campus Connect aims to make it easier to find the right skills
Skills needs are changing fast, and the range of education on offer needs to keep pace. Now Campus Connect is getting under way – a three-year project in which business, education and research will work together to find solutions to the skills challenge.
Many companies in Skellefteå will recognise the situation. They know roughly which skills they are missing, but when those skills are not covered by existing education programmes, there is no clear way forward. At the same time, there are people with the right potential who struggle to find the right route into further education.
That is precisely the gap Campus Connect will address.
“We’re not taking on everything. We step in where the need can’t be met with what already exists,” says Susan Blessing, process lead for Campus Connect at Skellefteå Universities Alliance.
“We’re not looking for participants. We’re building the model together with the companies.”
The idea is actually quite simple: to get better at building education around real needs, rather than hoping that education provision and working life will happen to find each other on their own.
That is why the approach always starts with the reality of the companies. Which skills are missing, what can already be solved and what requires something new? Sometimes the answer may be an existing programme that the company has not yet found. In other cases, a company needs to develop something new together with a university or another education provider. These solutions are then put to the test as pilots, which we will launch as early as 2027. And whatever works is developed further into a lasting format.
Susan Blessing, process lead for Campus Connect.
The focus is above all on areas where the pace of change is high and where new skills quickly become critical: electrification, sustainable energy, and industrial and digital development.
