Abstract
Objectives The objectives of this study are to spread awareness in the academia and the industry regarding technological innovation needed to respond to the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the fashion industry and to suggest a direction for developing a related extracurricular curriculum.
 Methods To that end, this study analyzed the curriculum development and implementation case for the smart tech fashion professional training course at Dong-A University, which was run for four years from 2018 to 2021. A course evaluation was performed by 98 course graduates during the four years, and a survey was performed at 60 fashion companies based in Busan to evaluate the industry’s awareness.
 Results The smart tech IT convergence fashion professional training course was designed with such keywords as smart design, big data, 3D printing, wearable smart devices, virtual fitting, ICT, and AI. The average score of the course evaluation by course graduates was 4.8 out of 5 before the COVID-19 outbreak, and 4.35 after the pandemic began. Both scores indicated high overall satisfaction. The survey performed to evaluate the fashion industry’s awareness regarding fashion curricula showed the importance of big data and the need for practical skills. The fashion industry was aware of the need for training that can spread awareness about fourth industrial technologies and improve job performance. However, they found it burdensome to enter the technological field.
 Conclusions Given the importance of the fourth industrial technology recognized by the industry and the need for relevant personnel, there were insufficient training and personnel nurturing in Busan. Accordingly, we developed and implemented an extracurricular curriculum focused on convergence education content, which is difficult to apply quickly to a regular curriculum at a university, amid the fast-changing technological trend. In that way, we responded to industrial demands. In maximizing the effectiveness of training, the corporate infrastructure is important as it allows course graduates to actively use relevant fourth industrial technologies after gaining employment. Therefore, overall poor working conditions can lead to the outflow of local manpower. As metaverses emerge and the innovation of the fashion industry accelerates in digital fashion, it is necessary to develop and administer training courses participated by field personnel, based on the close cooperation between the academia, the fashion industry, and the local government from a long-term perspective.
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