Today's world is characterized by great instability and a huge number of uncertainties. Society needs to adapt to these dynamics and at the same time, must be able to generate mechanisms in order to anticipate forthcoming changes. An awareness of a common destiny and a progressive creation of a world community in the learning process of self-discovery and self-management, launching local and regional identities, becomes a must for societal development. At the same time civil society becomes the key-player in the construction of strategy for change. The change of paradigms is evident particularly in education - and becomes crucial in helping the development of strong common visions and prospects. In the present work we propose to analyze what can be the generic role played by higher education in the construction of knowledge in order to solve challenges that emerge from and to society. Our work will be based on a comparative analysis of course offers, both formal and non-formal, that are available at universities and polytechnics in Portugal, through different knowledge domains related with the society's challenges. We take as base-case for our study the needs of the automotive supply industry operating in Portugal. The overall auto industry is well known worldwide by is concerns related with sustainable development, an area that requires continuous updating of its human resources thus calls for adequate education and training options, able to answer this challenges. Through a survey conducted to the companies operating in the automotive suppliers industry in Portugal, we will try to see if there is a relation between the goals of sustainability official announced by the companies and stated in their missions and visions, and the respective materialization in concrete actions within these organizations. Moreover, we will try to devise if the present educational offers respond to the concrete needs of these companies, both giving the adequate training to their human resources, and also by the capacities granted to the key people to implement sustainable development policies. Initially we have established a set of categories of analysis supported by the core competencies (conceptual and procedural) required in the concerned area. By matching the supply and the demand side of the equation and always keeping in mind that sustainable development is a never ending evolution process, we tried to perform the technical validation of the collected information and developed its analysis in order to answer to the main question of our research about the role of higher education offers in Portugal to help the development of our organizations and the society as a whole.
