<p>University–industry partnerships are one of the means for companies to build relevant engineering competency portfolios. The key novelty of the paper is the idea of a competency portfolio as a space of the knowledge, skills, abilities of all engineers within a company, taking into account stages of the product life cycle, company’s collaboration with universities, other external partners (such as research, technology organisations, technical colleges). To determine the impact of this collaboration on the engineering competency portfolio, the authors design earmarked methodologies embedding a collaboration space structure into that of a competency space. This approach has been tested in the framework of a survey of one of the most innovative sectors—industrial robotics. Survey data analysis suggests that those two spaces are combined at all stages of the product life cycle affecting both specialised engineering competencies as well as cross-cutting (e.g. soft) competencies. The significant contribution of this paper is establishing a connection between both competency, collaboration structures as an invariant characteristic of the resulting engineering competency portfolio</p>