The IoT Talent Consortium, conceived at Cisco’s IoT World Forum in 2014 with the aim of boosting the IT talent pool and establishing formal qualifications for IoT skills, is gearing up for a formal launch early in 2016 with the aim of having a million learners by 2020.
According to a membership presentation on its web site the organisation will hold a major launch event in Q1 of 2016 with the aim of having 125 member organisations and 10,000 learners by June 2016. By 2020 it wants to have 2000 members and one million learners. The Consortium is planning its first event, a Talent Innovation Summit in San Jose early in 2016, details to be available later.
The Consortium was conceived at Cisco’s IoT World Forum in 2014, but has had a low profile to date. Current members of the Consortium are Cisco, GE, Pearson, Rockwell Automation, The New York Academy of Sciences, IQNavigator, and the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, VP and general manager Cisco Services, and chairman/CEO of the consortium, told a press briefing at IoT World Forum 2015 in Dubai: “The consortium will bring people together, find ways to scale this kind of education through a collective set of approaches and then ensure that the people being skilled up for these jobs can be placed in the right kind of roles.”
Beliveau-Dunn said the genesis of the organisation had been a partnership between Cisco and Rockwell Automation. “We knew we could not do this on our own so we decided to set up a not-for-profit outside of Cisco with a board of directors with the objective being to create a framework of educators, industries, solution providers and professionals.
“Rockwell and Cisco got together and created the curriculum, a set of training programmes and they are now taking this and using it to reskill their entire ecosystem. We have trained 2000 people in the last few months with just one company. This is the model we want to take across every industry.”
More industry partners wanted
She said organisations from other industries would be needed to develop the range of training material required. “We will need a collection of industries to define the new standards for jobs.”
Beyond sector-specific IoT skills Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn said: “The talent of the future will need both technical and business insight. They will need to be able to communicate well and collaborate because the new way of working in the future will be collaborative. None of these solutions will happen in a vacuum. They will be co-created by individuals from within and from outside the organisation.”
The organisation intends to make its training standards available to both universities and the private sector. “We will give the new standards we have created for these new jobs to universities so they can drive these into their curricula. We will also be talking to corporate training organisations, Beliveau-Dunn said. “This will be a very open consortium, and a global organisation.”
The author attended IoT World Forum 2015 as a guest of Cisco.
