In engineering education, practical experience in professional settings is essential, whether through workshops held at partner companies, special classes with qualified personnel, supervised internships, etc. This relationship between students and companies in the region is essential for optimal acquisition of the program's academic skills and an understanding of the professional environment. In turn, faculty involved in these activities reinforce their knowledge of processes within current frameworks.

Due to contractual difficulties, economic problems, and regulatory challenges in region’s regulations, it’s been a perceived decline in the availability of internships in companies. Furthermore, students who need to complete fieldwork sometimes face restrictions on access to workspaces, strict data protection, and data and statistics that were previously public are much more restricted. These circumstances make difficult to practice topics in a real work environment or to use contextual data from real business systems. Added to this is the ever-increasing student enrolment, which reduces opportunities for real internships.

To adapt to this scenario, an alternative was created and implemented in engineering courses at the National Technological University, Rosario Regional Faculty, and other universities. Working as a team, they were able to overcome the problem by creating a pre-practicum program with professional characteristics, simulating internships or supervised professional practices. To achieve this, alternative systems from business environments are used, replicating their structure, processes, behaviours, data, and statistical information, for data analysis and problem-solving through research. These systems are a valid replacement because they are based on a creative reconstruction of problem studies from real, existing companies. These systems are available to instructors through a repository of Simulation Fieldwork Projects and Final Projects completed in previous years.

Having completed the pre-internship, students receive training just as if they had already had professional experience. However, the implementation of these internships at higher levels of the course is only viable if at the previous levels, students are trained not only in academic skills but also in self-regulation, assessment, and follow-up, professional behaviour, management of digital environments and team collaboration. Therefore, other vertically articulated courses must coordinate a series of strategic activities for the acquisition of these skills, so that students are fully prepared upon reaching the higher levels.

This work shows the teaching strategies for the acquisition of the described skills aggregated at the lower levels, and the simulated alternative business environments created for teaching in higher-level engineering courses. These environments are also applicable to the Mechanical Engineering program's research project, dedicated to the optimization of industrial processes through the implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies to companies in the region.

Keywords: Simulation, alternative professional practices, engineering, strategies, self-regulation, behaviour, management skills.