Collaboration for Learning - Industrial PhD-students in the Intersection of Academia and Work-life

Contemporary societal issues often call for the inclusion of many perspectives and competences hence there is a demand for increased academia-society collaboration in order to generate learning, new knowledge, and dissemination of research findings. Academia needs to apply collaboration for learning within a broad spectrum of contexts. Interaction with society and practice are of crucial importance for universities today. University West in Sweden has a profile area in work-integrated learning (WIL) to address issues on integrating theory and practice in all levels of higher education. An under-researched field of academia-society collaboration is here explored revealing the perspectives of industrial PhD- students. The aim of this study is hence to apply a WIL approach to explore the perspectives of Industrial PhD-students on collaborative learning acting in the intersection of academia and work-life. Industrial PhD-students are fully employed by industry during their PhD education. Accordingly, the industrial PhD students are at the same time involved in both academia and industry, with the same academic demands as traditionally enrolled academic PhD students combined with demands and expectations from their industrial employers. Qualitative methods were applied. All industrial PhD-students across disciplines at University West (in total 21) were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. Findings expose insights that industrial PhD-students are acting as key stakeholders in academia and society embodying the collaboration for learning between practice and university. However, this kind of collaboration for learning covers both benefits and challenges to be aware of as prerequisites for work-integrated learning in academia as well as in industry. Some implications to point out are that the industrial PhD-students are spanning boundaries between academia and industry bringing forth access to networks, and empirical data. Furthermore, the results implicate that industrial PhD-students have continuous opportunities for validation and testing of empirical results and models in industry. To conclude this study also contributes to broaden the WIL concept to also include the category of industrial PhD education. Further studies will also include the perspectives on the industry of this kind of collaboration