Today, the insights on the impact of the 4th industrial revolution are growing. Companies with a clear Industry 4.0 (implementation) strategy have the ambition to become the best in product development and production so as to strengthen their competitiveness and improve their responsiveness to the customer. These companies are not stuck in pilot purgatory but are seeing the enormous – direct AND indirect – benefits. Furthermore, they contribute significantly to the transition towards a sustainable world.
The success of this strategy is to a large extent directly related to the attention that is paid to workforce development, in line with the company’s digitalisation/Industry 4.0 strategy, challenges and needs. As a company, you should focus on upskilling and reskilling but also on redeployment of people with “non-matching” and/or “outdated” skills. This focus will lead to empowered people delivering more added value related to their intrinsic level of skills.
The Industry 4.0 technologies that are currently available or will become available in the (near) future lead or will lead to:
Technology will not solve all problems. Your workforce will also need to upscale their knowhow of technical and soft skills, combined with on-the-job training. In this way, you will build expertise and make your employees more resilient and flexible. It is important to turnaround their mindset so that they start seeing these changes as an opportunity rather than a threat.
Motivating your employees is important and cannot be neglected. Creating an open, innovative and collaborative corporate culture helps to ensure that employees feel safe to contribute to the process of change, to make mistakes for improved learning and to run the extra mile.
Workforce development should be adapted to the employees’ individual level of skills. The previous figure gives different possible trajectories for getting the most out of people’s capabilities and for creating workable work and an empowering environment so that they can create more added value compared to before the training.
Do you want to know more about workforce development? Be sure to download our Industry 4.0 report! Fill in the form below and we will send you the report via email.
Dirk Torfs - CEO
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