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.

o Provision 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