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As a precursor to designing the ConPEC platform for stronger industry-academia collaborations, we investigated factors which instructors would consider when collaborating with practitioners to complement their pedagogical efforts. We found that instructors' considerations were influenced by students' preferences and bias, students' career and development, student learning outcomes, curriculum structure, as well as ethnic and gender diversity. Findings inform input for the design of web-based collaborative networks. Also, this study contributes to expanding literature on industry-academia collaborations for workforce development. 

The need to prepare students for the workplace, shortage of skilled labor, and fast-paced changes in the industry necessitate improvements in the pedagogical frameworks of educational communities. Practitioners are required to provide practical insights, rigor, and realism to complement academia pedagogic efforts in construction education. However, this is being plagued by several complexities. Leveraging advances in computational techniques, this paper presents the considerations of practitioners and instructors in workforce development collaborations as inputs for a graphical user interface of a technology-driven matching platform for connecting professional and educational communities. Practitioners’ considerations are students and specific course-support related, while instructors’ considerations are related to practitioner suitability, project, and company characteristics. The study contributes to human factors principles in user interface design as well as user-centered design principles by highlighting information requirements of a collaborative network of instructors and practitioners. The findings of this study also provide insights to enhance industry-academia collaborations.