"With new accelerators delivering beams always smaller and more energetic, requirements for very precise beam alignment become more and more challenging. After the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its planned upgrade, proposed lepton linear colliders require unprecedented tolerances of beam alignment at nanometre level.PACMAN, a study on Particle Accelerator Components Metrology and Alignment to the Nanometre scale, is an Innovative Doctoral Program, hosted by CERN. It offers training to 10 Early Stage Researchers in beam instrumentation, metrology, micrometric alignment, magnetic measurements, nano-positioning and high precision engineering. The training goal of PACMAN is to create a new generation of scientists equipped with a wide-ranging expertise in advanced engineering and a broad span of transferable skills. Special emphasis will be put on women scientists.The technical goal of the program is to develop very high accuracy metrology and alignment tools and integrate them in a single automatic test stand. The methods and tooling developed will be validated on components of the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) currently being developed. This new multi-disciplinary approach will be applied on future facilities under development at CERN and elsewhere. Hardware and methods will be brought to the market by the network partners that will maintain technological leadership in these cutting-edge technologies.For each research field, the most innovative universities, laboratories and industries will work together. They have showed a genuine interest in the research goals. ESR will be supervised by internationally recognized experts, in an exceptional academic and industrial network.Precise alignment and metrology is already part of industrial standards in areas as diverse as high precision manufacturing, automotive, aerospace or telescope assembly. The result of this research will allow industry and research in Europe to stay one step ahead in precision manufacturing."