Emerging Skills Project in Electrification

‘Emerging Skills’ are defined as those related to ‘Emerging Technologies’ and necessary to exploit their application in industry as they become widespread. The technologies themselves may have existed for some time or be cutting-edge, but their diffusion into industry is at an early stage, with low take-up ahead of widescale adoption. Examples include industrial digitalisation technologies such as additive manufacturing, robotics, AI, electrification and advanced materials.

Following January’s Skills for Jobs White Paper, we launched the first Emerging Skills Project in partnership with the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and the Institutes of Technology. This project uses the Skills Value Chain approach to stimulate the adoption of cutting-edge skills in a given sector. The Skills Value Chain is made up of three core activities, delivered collaboratively in succession:

• Foresighting, an activity that forecasts emerging skills in a sector and identifies the gap in current provision and future need.
• Development of open license training content to meet the gaps identified in foresighting.
• Skills Diffusion, which consists of:
• o‘Train the trainer’ days.
• oProvision of no-charge trainee days to upskill employees in the new emerging skills training content.

In addition to announcing the first Emerging Skills Project, the White Paper also explored whether this Skills Value Chain approach can be used in other emerging skills areas and to support Government priorities such as net zero. The focus for this second, net-zero project, is electrification. This project will provide some of the skills needed to deliver Point 4 of the Government’s ten-point plan for a Green Industrial Revolution – accelerating the shift to zero emission vehicles