The rapid advances of technologies, constantly brings new demands for new skills and expertise of the professionals in IT industry. There is a constant need for people that have in-depth understanding and know how to develop the new innovative services using these new technologies. In these settings, the real challenge is how to find the right persons with the right education in an industry where the in-thing yesterday may be out-of-date tomorrow? To add to this challenge, universities are still “increasingly stove-piped in highly specialized disciplinary fields” (Hurlburt et al., 2010) as well as there is a lack of flexibility for the professionals to have their competences developed. All this points out the great challenges that universities are facing for alignment between academic development within degree curricula and the requirements that industry demands for their specific needs (Falcone et al. 2014). In this research effort we report our experiences from an ongoing Graduate Professional Development Program where we address these challenges through a co-creation process with IT industry based on open innovation. Through this model we bring together research expertise, academic experience and experts from industry in a collaborative process for developing courses to suit the current needs of IT professionals. As an outcome of this process, the course content is tailor-made, as well as everything else in connection, such as: bite-size modules, adjustable pace, open and online educational resources, as well as a flipped classroom approach to teaching. As a result, we have developed and provided so far five courses that have been very well accepted by the IT professional. Thus, in this paper we aim to provide some insights on approaches for facilitating continuous competence development plans for IT professionals within regular university educational offer.