Towards Industry 5.0: news skills and capabilities working group
The second session of the I4MS working group (WG) dedicated to skills was focused on the new skills and capabilities needed to adopt the industry 5.0 values. The speakers invited to talk about the future of work, and the initiatives that are already ongoing were the followed:
- Jakub Kajtman, European Commission policy officer
- Filippo Chiarello, assistant professor at the University of Pisa
- Giovanni Crisona, Founder of Skillman
European Project manager Marta Portalés (MWCB) and European project technician Marjorie Grassler moderated the workshop.
I4MS working for the future of the European manufacturing workforce
Digital Skills in the European manufacturing industry are considered at the top of the topics in the factories to-do list since industry 4.0 has brought the most advanced developed technologies to the plant floors. The digital transformation and the adoption of technologies such as Cobot, digital twin, artificial intelligence, etc., increase the factories’ competitiveness and optimization but moreover involve new skills for the workforce.
I4MS initiatives, besides expanding the digital innovation of manufacturing SMEs in Europe by offering technological and financial support, also provide a training catalogue with more than 150 opportunities for the manufacturing ecosystem to get on board the digital transformation.
“The society of tomorrow is the curricula of today”
Giovanni Crisona presented Skillman, an initiative founded in 2014 covering the vocation education and training (TVET) sector. Human capital is the focus for the economy and workplace in the megatrends’ context. In addition, the pandemic effects increased the need to consider this perspective. Skillman initiatives want to give more sense to the learning explained Crisona:
“Education cannot only be an initial, but it has to be reorganized to cover lifelong learning. It is about re-engineering for a change to improve the TVET system”.
The objective is the reinforce human capital and provide people with the right skills. The work environment pointed toward the Skillman founder has to be ambient for learning:
“The worker has been to provide support and stimulation to understand and learn and deploy his capacities, which will give him new opportunities”.
“55% of European companies face difficulties to recruit ICT specialists”
During his presentation, the European Commission policy officer Jakub Kajtman highlighted two issues: the digital skill gap with 44% of Europeans who do not have the basic skills and the lack of ICT specialists. The European Commission presented a set of actions under a strategy called Digital decade to tackle those obstacles:
“One of the sets of targets will, by 2030, bridge the gap and bring 80% of the population to have these basic skills and pass from 7,8 million to 20 million employed ICT specialists”.
Digital skills and jobs Platform, launched in May 2021, wants to be a one-stop-shop for digital skills to connect all the initiatives. The main objectives of the platform are to help deliver the purposes of the digital decades, strengthen the community, and use the platform’s primary tool for the digital skills and jobs coalition to provide customer services.
“The analysis provided here demonstrates the extent to which ESCO captures the technologies and related skill needs associated with I4.0”
Assistant professor Filippo Chiarello from the research group Business engineering for data science of the University of Pisa presented the application developed to measure if and how much the European framework for Skills/Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) is online with industry 4.0:
“The ESCO classification identifies and categorises skills, competences, qualifications and occupations relevant for the EU labour market, education, and training. It systematically shows the relationships between the different concepts”.
The methodology is based on text mining and natural language processing. Results able to extract more than 750 technologies from 13.000 scientific papers on i4.0, analysing 10.000 ESCO skills.
Industry 5.0, the complement for the workforce to take back control of job transformation
The second part of the session was dedicated to a debate on essential questions that will mark the future of the manufacturing sector. After a brief introduction to the concept of industry 5.0, questions were asked to the speakers and to the assistance through slide.do:
1. How do we cope with the digital skill gap?
According to EC Policy officer, the Digital skills and jobs Platform is one of the tools that offer the European Commission to tackle the gap. There are several actions, first: digital education actions plan (update school curricula, councillor recommendations), code week, (basis for this advanced digital skill). Then, the founding opportunities such as Digital Decade and the recovering resilience facilities. The third group of actions will be focused on community actions, sharing experiences, structural dialogue. Katjman reminded the EC president Ursula Von Der Layen engagement during the State of Union speech addressed in 2021:
“We will invest in 5g and fibre but equally important is the investment in capital and digital skills”.
Skillman founder, Giovanni Crisona assured that our mission in society is to improve human capacity for production. The connection to territorial needs is essential. The focus has to be oriented to train the trainers, to connect all this effort in working together with a work-based learning approach, and to teach skills that allow people to have a job.
2. How do we anticipate the risks of unemployment?
The nature of work and nature of skills is changing, explained Jakub Kajtman and the key is to be flexible and be ready to learn new skills, follow life-long learning, soft skills and be open to new trends. The problem on the management side, according to the EC policy officer, is the fear of technological changes.
For Assistant professor Filippo Chiarello, the keyword is complexity:
“We (Europe, policymakers, industries, students,) have to find ways to break down the complexity in order to make fast decisions.”
Chiarello argued that the Digital skill gap means understanding where technology is going and where we can train and upskill and reskill people to follow or anticipate the changes and drive people. The objective is to translate this evidence into pedagogical actions.
The priority in the words of Crisona is to understand the territory needs and then co-create the new curricula within the TVET:
“We are missing the basics, we have an education system that is still designed for a society that is not anymore existing.”
It is urgent to think of work as an environment where you can learn. It is about providing skills that make the company more resilient. People must be able to grow up in the company environment.
3. How do we foresee a human-centric job transformation?
The concept of Metaverse was introduced to refer to the non foresee transformation. For EC policy officer, the Metaverse is a vision of the Facebook leader. What is important is the capacity of the worker to be flexible. It is in the interest of the employees to listen to how to shape their job. Employees must be empowered, employers must enable lifelong learning, and give upskill opportunities.
Every technology has drawbacks that are extremely hard to foresee, explained Chiarello. The example of Instagram shows that the application is an apparently easy tech but there are a lot of psychological drawbacks. With the Metaverse, there is no document explaining possible drawbacks.
Crisona pointed towards the problem with new platforms, it is the moment when there is a simplification. There are actions that are not accessible anymore.
The future of work: collaboration, long-life learning, and skills validation
The last minutes of the session were dedicated for the assistant to do some networking while fulfilling a mural board on three elements: state-of-the-art of digital skills situation, the risks if nothing is done and the ideal path towards industry 5.0. The summary of the answers can be consulted in the graphic below:
