Learning factories and sustainable engineering: Competencies for students and industrial workforce

Sustainability and the circular economy are becoming increasingly important for industry and academia. Learning factories at higher education institutions around the globe attempt to educate students and industrial workers on these topics through specially developed training modules. To successfully implement measures to mitigate issues, such as climate change, product life cycle considerations-in which different phases may require different worker competencies-are indispensable. In this context, we provide some evaluation of learning factory use cases regarding sustainability. The use cases are evaluated on product life cycle phases and respective worker sustainability and circular economy competencies. The results show that the majority of the use cases focus on the production life cycle phase; product development, product use, and end-of-life have either not or very rarely been addressed. Our general conclusions and implications relate to these findings with a recommendation that learning factories expand their training capabilities.