Last modified: 2020-01-11
Abstract
Humans, being an entity when accompanied by knowledge, skills and competences, further transform into a resource acting as an asset for the industry, leading to human capital. This research paper determines skills and competence requirements for the era of future industrial revolution ‘Industry 4.0’. The Industry 4.0 describes a CPS oriented production system (Riedl, Zipper, Meier &Diedrich, 2014; Henning, 2013; The Industrial Internet Consortium, 2014) that integrates production facilities, warehousing systems, logistics, and even social requirements to establish the global value creation networks (Frazzon, Hartmann, Makuschewitz & Scholz-Reiter, 2013). The core of distributed automation systems is essentially the reliable exchange of information. The new technologies, Ethernet, wireless networks, or web technologies, created new opportunities for making information exchange more comprehensive.
(1) Purpose and Potential Impact: The main objective of this paper is to investigate the changes in requirements for the skills and competences in the context of Industry 4.0 and provide a model for graduates to develop the required skills and competences in a strategically optimized way to retain their jobs in changing working environment. Technology can indeed be a significant enabler for achieving competences in the technology driven world. There is a need to look beyond the phrase, Information and Communication Technology and use the term technology more holistically. For this to happen, substantial investment will need to be made across infrastructure, teaching, education, and content and curriculum. It is necessary for technology to be incorporated into curriculum delivery and teacher capacity building.
(2) Research Methodology: The research draws on literature review of 11 relevant studies and subjective opinion gathering from 281 first year engineering students of an Institution of National importance in the field of engineering in India, and the skills and competences are broadly categorized into Technical, Social, Personal and Practical and their preference orders are decided accordingly for the era of Industry 4.0 using Friedman test and Chi-square tests.
(3) Findings: The study is conclusive about Technical and Practical skills being more preferred as it endorses Continuous Learning, Interdisciplinary Knowledge, Critical Thinking and Decision Making as the most preferred competences for young graduates to prepare themselves for the challenges coming up due to Industry 4.0 but the social and personal skill-set also need to be developed to have a better humane approach for future.
(4) Originality/value: This study is one of the few considering emerging Industry 4.0 in the Indian context. As a result, the research provides useful new insights for researchers, teachers and industrialists to enhance existing and embed new skill-set according to a human work-force in the era of Industry 4.0.