Multilevel comprehension for labor market inclusion: a qualitative study on experts' perspectives on Industry 4.0 competences

Abstract

PurposeGiven the exponential and massive technological disruption in work that Industry 4.0 will lead to, nowadays, authors and practitioners within the field of education and training are witnessing increased attention on the features of and threats to employability and integration in current labor transformations. The purpose of this paper is to address current education and training challenges as related to the fourth industrial revolution by investigating which skills and competences will be crucial for the 4.0 era.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative field study with semi-structured interviews has been conducted. Qualitative data on a sample of N = 16 vocational training experts has been analyzed via the grounded theory approach for a bottom-up perspective on Industry 4.0 competences.FindingsData analysis revealed a partial consensus between current scientific literature and practitioners' views on skills and competences for Industry 4.0. Indeed, practioners support the need for a mix of competences comprising the broad group of disciplines of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), technical skills and transversal competences. Moreover, the perspective of practitioners supports a multilevel comprehension of the needs of Industry 4.0 for education and training. Drawing on these findings, an evaluation tool for an applied field intervention for inclusion in the labor market is proposed.Originality/valueThe paper advances current knowledge within the field of education and training by proposing a novel perspective to address market integration as a means to tackle the risk of technological disruption.

Enhancing critical thinking and media literacy in the context of IVET: a systematic scoping review

“…Initial vocational education and training (IVET) pathways place a great emphasis on the acquisition of technical skills. This acquires prominence in light of the push for alignment between training and the labour market in the context of the fourth industrial revolution (Perini et al , 2021; Tommasi et al , 2021), with a strong attitude of closure towards educational models featuring higher levels of intellectual training. Although technical education has social implications such as increasing the employability level of students and supporting the workforce, the lack of educational approaches directed at intellectual training is considered to be at the root of a deterioration in metacognitive skills such as critical thinking and media literacy (Tommasi et al , 2020).…”

Impact of Industry 4.0 adoption on workload demands in contact centers

“…Handling this amount of data requires different skills and competencies that most employees may not be yet prepared for (Costa & Portioli-Staudacher, 2021;Tommasi et al, 2021), justifying the increase in mental demand derived from the use of big data. The mixed effects of IoT and big data on the mental demand of contact centers' employees allow us to partially validate H 1 .…”

“…Challenges to its adoption in the workplace include the visualization, sharing, querying, and updating of the information generated by data sets with sizes exceeding the capacity of usual software to process within an acceptable time and value (Harford, 2014; Madden, 2012). Handling this amount of data requires different skills and competencies that most employees may not be yet prepared for (Costa & Portioli‐Staudacher, 2021; Tommasi et al, 2021), justifying the increase in mental demand derived from the use of big data. The mixed effects of IoT and big data on the mental demand of contact centers' employees allow us to partially validate H 1 .…”

“…In terms of human aspects, I4.0 adoption requires specific skills and qualifications (e.g., data analytics and programming capabilities) that may not be available in the existing workforce (Tommasi et al, 2021). That undermines the inclusion of workers whose abilities do not meet the necessities of this new management paradigm, impairing I4.0's pervasiveness across different socioeconomic contexts (Tortorella, Rossini, et al, 2021).…”

Rynek Pracy Big Data: Przegląd Wymagań W Branży

“…The requirements of the current state of labor market and their impact onto competences of IT specialists have been elier studied in [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. The given research was carried out in the context of project no.…”