Identifying Future Skill Requirements of the Job Profiles for a Sustainable European Manufacturing Industry 4.0

Abstract

The exponential growth of digitalisation and the continuous increase in sustainability needs are currently reshaping the European manufacturing industry through its entire value chain. Industrial sectors have undergone significant changes globally in recent years, and they will continue to face this deep transformation. The manufacturing sectors, more specifically, companies, need to develop a relevant strategy that can support their organisation to handle the upcoming future technological developments and sustainability requirements properly. In order to implement the strategy effectively and achieve an adequate digital and green transformation, their main focus should be the development of a multi-skilled workforce. This competent workforce can only be built by foreseeing the changes in the needed skills for the manufacturing industry and then updating the skills of the current workforce accordingly. As an answer to this need, we developed an automated skill database for the manufacturing industry, particularly transversal occupations of this sector related to the industrial symbiosis (IS) and energy efficiency (EE). Differently from the conventional ones, the generated database incorporated not only the current but also the future skill needs for each profile. During the development of the future skills for each occupation in the database, we identified the foreseen skill needs for the manufacturing industry through detailed desk research. Therefore, this paper presents a valuable perspective on the subject. Our work aimed to fill the gap for a database specifically developed for the manufacturing industry, which provides the end-users with data about the new skills requirements resulting from industrial changes and sustainability needs. We believe that companies, education and training institutions and policymakers can make use of the generated database as a complementary tool for developing their training programmes or strategy roadmaps to cover the emerging changes in each individual industrial sector.