Up-Skill blog

Following a comprehensive review of the Up-Skill case study organisation´s business strategies, outputs, production processes and strategic technology challenges and objectives, the next step for the Up-Skill researchers is to identify technologies that can provide solutions to manufacturing and production process issues, whilst simultaneously being integrated effectively with the human workforce and complimenting the firm´s overall business strategy and market operations.

The Up-Skill project focuses on understanding the impact of Industry 4.0 and 5G technologies, such as autonomous robots, machine learning, big data and analytics, augmented reality, and cloud computing, on job roles, job content and managerial competencies to help ensure the preservation of human knowledge, skills, and craftsmanship, shifting the business mindset from a substitution to an augmentation approach.

The triple bottom line is a concept that measures the success of a company, not only in terms of financial profits, but also their social and environmental impact. The three aspects of the triple bottom line are often referred to as people, planet, and profit.

If you are anything like the friends and colleagues that we interviewed to ask if they know what an ethnographer is, you will probably go blank. In truth, it is a term that sounds far more exotic and oddly distant than it actually is. An ethnographer is a social scientist who studies people and cultures by observing and interacting with them in their natural environment. Ethnographers can be useful in a variety of settings, including business, education, healthcare, and government, among others.

Despite long-held fears among workers, automation does not simply, by virtue of its inherent nature, ‘threaten’ jobs. Nor do jobs carry inherent irreducible characteristics that render them automatable. Different attempts at classifying ‘at risk’ occupations have, unsurprisingly, come to wildly different conclusions.

TWI is one of a team of partners in the Up-Skill Project, who are developing a greater understanding of how businesses and organisations can benefit from Industry 5.0.

Consortium members Malardalen University, the University of Milan, the Joining 4.0 Innovation Centre (J4IC: partners Lancaster University and TWI) and the Anglia Ruskin Innovation Centre (ARIC: partners Anglia Ruskin University and TWI) are currently working on the Up-Skill project: Up-skilling for Industry 5.0 Roll-out, which they won funding for in 2022 from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. The aim of Up-Skill is to develop a better understanding of how businesses can benefit from improved machine/human integration in the workplace.

The first Work Package of the Up-Skill project, consisting of a State-of-the-Art Literature Review, an Ethnographic Framework Report, and an Ethnography Workshop, has been completed, laying the foundation for the Up-Skill case studies to begin.

The Horizon Europe BRIDGES 5.0 Project, alongside Up-Skill, is a project managed by the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA), related to the development of workforce skills for industry.

The Up-Skill project presented at TWI´s annual Digital Manufacturing Conference

A paradigm shift from automation to human-machine augmentation

Case studies will show how the potential for automation and human input is being played out in a range of industrial, competitive and supply chain settings.

Investigating the future of human-machine interaction in the workplace