The report explores how digitisation is changing life at work - giving examples of how industrial companies are adapting their organisation to a new digital reality and offering new ideas of how Europe can boost the much required “digital skills” to remain competitive in the global digital market.
Key points from the report include:
· Lifelong learning is essential to ensure the workforce’s continuous employability in a digital world as new jobs appear and others transform. At Orange personal efforts to upgrade skills are recognised and promoted by means of a “digital passport” – an icon that employees can add to their signature once they have successfully completed a digital training.
· European companies’ human resource management needs to adapt to changes in skills requirements to reap the full benefits of digitisation. Vodafone shifted its learning culture from one where learning was frequently completed in a classroom to one where 90% of learning is done digitally.
· The educational system needs to fully embrace digital technologies to prepare the current and future workforce for their digital future. Deutsche Telekom is providing an alternative to traditional teaching by offering a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for all employees to challenge digitisation issues impacting the company ranging from the ‘Connected Car’ to the ‘Internet of Things’
· We also need to teach the teachers. Only when teachers feel sufficiently comfortable and have access to digital technologies are they capable of passing on their knowledge and enthusiasm to students
· Automation does not imply job losses. Siemens’ state-of-the-art “smart factory” in Amberg (Germany), uses intelligent machines to produce and distribute 950 products in more than 50,000 variants at only 12 defects per million. Productivity has multiplied whilst the factory workforce remains stable and indispensable
