Where does learning actually happen now?
BTH and Ericsson have launched a new apprenticeship model, Software Engineering Apprenticeship (SEA), that lets software engineering students spend up to a fifth of their final years of study working inside Ericsson’s development teams — not just reading about the job, but doing it. It’s a small programme, starting with around 15 students a year, but it points at a much bigger question for the future of work: where, and with whom, should learning actually happen?
A small programme, a bigger question
SEA lets students in years three to five of the software engineering degree combine their studies with paid, qualified engineering work at Ericsson, working alongside professional engineers in real development environments.
Up to 20% of study time spent working inside Ericsson’s teams.
Up to 15 apprentices a year, during the programme’s first three years.
Open to students in years three to five of the software engineering degree.
BTH describes it as a new generation of engineering education. Ericsson describes it as a way of bringing academia closer to industry’s needs.
Why we think about organisations as living systems
We’d frame SEA slightly differently: as a quiet admission that “study, then work” stopped being an obvious sequence once the skills a company needs started shifting faster than a syllabus can be rewritten.
We think about organisations as living systems more than fixed structures, and we’ve built our own projects around that idea. AI Factory brings together researchers from Blekinge Institute of Technology and practitioners from companies including Ericsson, Telenor, Hyper Island, iStudios and AllBinary — not as separate tracks, but in the same rooms, working through the same open questions about how AI becomes part of everyday work.
Researchers and practitioners in the same lab, not separate tracks.
Problems chosen because they’re real, not hypothetical.
What’s learned shared regionally, rather than kept inside one organisation
SEA does something similar at a much smaller, individual scale: a university and a company sharing responsibility for someone’s competence continuously, instead of handing it over once, at graduation. It’s also why we sit inside Blue Science Park as a space owned jointly by BTH, Karlskrona kommun, Region Blekinge and the local business community — a structure built so that no single actor has to solve the competence question alone.
What this means for Karlskrona
Karlskrona’s unusual concentration of software engineers makes this more than an academic curiosity. If four in five roles here are touched by AI in some way, the real constraint isn’t tools or course content. It’s whether the institutions responsible for building competence can keep pace with how quickly that competence needs to change.
SEA doesn’t resolve that question. It just puts it somewhere visible — in roughly the same place we’ve been building our own answer, one shared lab at a time.
We explore the same question at AI Factory, our shared testbed for how AI becomes part of everyday work.
