Workers 4.0: skills, profiles and jobs in different business functions

Abstract

The term “Industry 4.0” refers to a new production paradigm, radically different from the previous ones because of its global scope and its certain (if not clearly defined) impact on social, economic and political structures. The key characteristics of the Industry 4.0 includes the integration of electronics and computer science observed in machine to machine communication (nowadays known as the Industrial Internet of Things), the possibilities opened up by cloud computing, the opportunities to explore big data, and augmented and/or virtual reality made possible by the past investments in computer games. The need to manage the use of these new technologies is likely to bring about a radical change in the design of products, how they are produced and, concomitantly, the organisation of work. This suggests that consideration needs to be given to the skills needs that are likely to arise. While predicting emerging skills needs from Industry 4.0 is still in its infancy, it is vitally important that steps are made to identifying those skills which people will need in the future. This chapter builds upon the previous one by Fantoni and his colleagues to: (i) Identify where, according to the Porter value-chain model, the effects of Industry 4.0 will take place; and (ii) Building on (i) identify the basic competences associated with the emerging job profiles resulting from Industry 4.0. After having identified and clustered competences by using text mining techniques, the chapter analyses how competences are distributed among company functions (i.e. marketing, sales, production, design, R&D, maintenance, etc.). Data are drawn from Scopus – the abstract and citation database – and O*NET. These provide information on emerging job/professional profiles and associated skill profiles respectively. Porter’s value-chain describes the structure of an organisation as a limited set of processes; it is divided into nine main processes, five primary and four supports. The primary processes are those which directly contribute to the creation of output, while the supporting ones are necessary for the latter to be produced. Using this model it is possible to identify the functions within organisations most affected by Industry 4.0. The result is a matrix that cross-classifies workers’ Industry 4.0 job profiles by business functions. From the analysis it is possible to notice not only where the new skills will have a particular impact, but also which are the professional profiles associated with them and in which business area they will contribute most