A smart factory needs a smart workforce

Digitisation has the potential to transform industries and many businesses are working on digital transformation strategies to increase efficiencies across their organisation, achieve greater quality assurance, improve product personalisation; essentially creating the ‘factory of the future’.

Realisation of this future state demands training and upskilling of employees. While there are many courses available on topics like machine learning and TensorFlow (an open source platform for machine learning), employees need to know how to use wearables in their daily job, how to provide effective instructions to robots and cobots, and how to repair a motor without formal training.

So, where do you start?

The workforce of the future learns in a different way to the workforce of the past. As a first step, businesses need to define the exact skillset needed for their very own factory of the future. Then, dedicated courses and materials (mockups, case studies, projects) need to be defined and developed.

It’s worth remembering that, as innovative and as digital as the factory of the future might be with all its complex new technologies, employees are not necessarily technology experts – they specialise in their respective fields.

So, training materials need to be tailored according to their audiences. If they are too complex or packed full of jargon they could negatively influence not only the workforce’s motivation to evolve but also day-to-day operations, and thus the business itself.

It’s also important to consider that workers of the future—mostly Millennials and Generation Z—expect immersive, intuitive content amenable for consumption on various devices and screens, and expect that content to be always on, always available.

The principal elements that training and learning programs should focus on are:

Wearables and gaming experience– augmented and mixed reality will be relied on to improve productivity;
Understanding and interpreting data– given factories of the future will be increasingly data driven;
Basic trouble shooting of machines via user interfaces– employees will be operating intelligent machines with software platforms;
Adapting to change– factories of the future will continue to adjust to new products, processes and technologies in an agile manner, hence employees will need to be able to continuously embrace change.

The Factory of the Future will rely on people

It’s imperative the workforce understands that digitisation is not a threat to their jobs. A factory of the future will never be 100 percent autonomous, at least not in the foreseeable future. A dedicated workforce will always be required to keep businesses running and successful.

A report from MIT states that technology such as AI will create as many new jobs as it eliminates. While it may seem far-fetched, if we think about today’s workforce, there are many occupations that we couldn’t have imagined a few decades ago. Today’s digital transformation journeys are the next step in this workforce evolution, requiring new skills and creating corresponding new jobs to deliver next generation services.

To make this a reality, businesses need a workforce with the right skill-set, and need to help their employees continuously learn to implement new tasks and processes quickly.

Training workers just once during their onboarding is not enough: learning should be a recurring process.

Here at Infosys, we have a strong emphasis on continuous learning and train and upskill all employees through LeX, our global online ‘corporate university’.

Modular courses allow employees to continuously upskill, be it building foundation knowledge of a subject or advancing in their specialism. This helps them prepare themselves, and in turn our clients’ workforces, for the future.

As factories of the future implement new, innovative technologies such as 3D printing, automation, IoT, machine learning and virtual and augmented reality, they will rely on the pace at which employees can adapt, just as much as they will rely on the speed of production to remain competitive. Now is the time for businesses to seriously consider adopting a continuous learning mentality.