Learning and upskilling in a virtual and safe environment

The fac­to­ry floor has been under­go­ing a trans­for­ma­tion over the last few years. Robot­ic arms assem­ble com­po­nents while above them cam­eras are scan­ning the com­po­nents in real time for any defects. Any faulty com­po­nent is then reject­ed by the assem­bly line and the human work­ers in the office are alert­ed to the prob­lem. They then analyse the sit­u­a­tion and make any nec­es­sary tweaks to the design. 

In the future, the inter­net of things (IoT), com­bined with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learn­ing, will help man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems to become even more intel­li­gent and think for them­selves. 

As excit­ing as this may sound, man­u­fac­tur­ers won’t be able to lever­age IoT if they don’t have employ­ees with the right skills. And hir­ing the right peo­ple can be a chal­lenge in itself. 

Transferring knowledge is a challenge

The prob­lem the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor faces is that there’s a knowl­edge gap. The sec­tor has an age­ing work­force and there are wor­ries that the old­er gen­er­a­tion will leave the sec­tor with­out pass­ing on their knowl­edge to the next gen­er­a­tion of incom­ing work­ers. 

A report pub­lished by the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Man­u­fac­tur­ers in 2019 found that a quar­ter of the US man­u­fac­tur­ing work­force were 55 or old­er. Of the firms sur­veyed, 97% con­ced­ed they were con­cerned about the age­ing work­force issue and 49% were very con­cerned about it.

At the same time, the pro­mo­tion of automa­tion in fac­to­ries means the future man­u­fac­tur­ing work­forces will need to be adept at deal­ing with tech­nolo­gies and per­form­ing high­ly ana­lyt­i­cal tasks involv­ing data. 

PwC’s Annu­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing Report 2020 shows 89% of UK man­u­fac­tur­ers are aware that the next gen­er­a­tion of employ­ees will need to be even more skilled than the one before to oper­ate effi­cient­ly. Though the shift away from man­u­al skills to tech­ni­cal ones will be grad­ual, 86% of UK man­u­fac­tur­ers sur­veyed said they under­stood the need for life-long learn­ing in the work­place and had a pol­i­cy in place for upskilling and retrain­ing work­forces. 

Immersive learning to bridge the knowledge gap

Anoth­er find­ing from the PwC report is that the major­i­ty (59%) of UK man­u­fac­tur­ers don’t believe the edu­ca­tion sys­tem is doing enough to pre­pare the future gen­er­a­tion of work­ers. Out­dat­ed and obso­lete soft­ware is some­times to blame as it’s often all that schools and col­leges can afford, accord­ing to the report. 

Eight out of 10 respon­dents agreed that it was up to the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor itself to active­ly engage those in edu­ca­tion and make them aware of the career oppor­tu­ni­ties. Man­u­fac­tur­ers should even be con­sid­er­ing part­ner­ing with local col­leges to cre­ate inde­pen­dent train­ing cen­tres to nur­ture tal­ent and equip them with the right dig­i­tal skills. 

One way man­u­fac­tur­ers can bridge the knowl­edge gap and train work­forces and teach them new skills is through immer­sive tech­nol­o­gy: aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR) and vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR). PwC research found that peo­ple who train in VR are more like­ly to retain infor­ma­tion; they would be four times more focused than if they were trained through e‑learning tools. 

“Immer­sive tech­nol­o­gy can be a pow­er­ful tool that increas­es the reten­tion of what is learnt through mem­o­rable and mean­ing­ful learn­ing expe­ri­ences. By phys­i­cal­ly ‘doing’, and not mere­ly observ­ing, at a mul­ti­sen­so­ry lev­el, more infor­ma­tion can be retained for longer peri­ods of time,” says Emi­ly Sav­age, head of immer­sive and cre­ative part­ner­ships at Dig­i­tal Cat­a­pult, the UK’s lead­ing advanced tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tion cen­tre.

An exam­ple of immer­sive tech­nol­o­gy in action is Rolls-Royce’s BR275 air­craft engine. Avi­a­tion cus­tomers are cur­rent­ly being invit­ed to a VR-based course, fol­low­ing the com­ple­tion of which they’ll be able to ser­vice BR275 engines and car­ry out non-rou­tine main­te­nance. Though not designed to replace in-per­son, prac­ti­cal train­ing com­plete­ly, VR train­ing enables air­craft man­u­fac­tur­ers to design, test and main­tain engines; new recruits can learn and prac­tise in a vir­tu­al and safe envi­ron­ment. 

“By trans­port­ing peo­ple to an alter­nate real­i­ty, where they’re enveloped and more engaged, immer­sive train­ing can repli­cate dan­ger­ous and expen­sive sce­nar­ios and improve soft skills. This makes it a par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful tool for sec­tors involv­ing hands-on, prac­ti­cal work and the oper­a­tion of indus­tri­al machin­ery, such as in man­u­fac­tur­ing and engi­neer­ing,” says Sav­age. 

Anoth­er advan­tage of immer­sive tech­nol­o­gy is that it’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to set up. All users require is a smart head­set or pair of smart glass­es and a reli­able broad­band con­nec­tion; there’s no com­pli­cat­ed inte­gra­tion involved.

Protecting skills is just as important

As tech­nol­o­gy advances in the years ahead, man­u­fac­tur­ers will not only need to upskill work­forces to be dig­i­tal ready, but they’ll also need to pro­tect skills.

The Mate­ri­als Pro­cess­ing Insti­tute in Mid­dles­brough is cur­rent­ly work­ing with a glob­al author­i­ty on indus­tri­al IoT to under­stand the poten­tial of imple­ment­ing AR at its steel pro­duc­tion research plant on Teesside. It’s expect­ed that AR will help work­ers to make more informed deci­sions as they move around the facil­i­ty and trou­bleshoot issues in real time.

The idea is for AR to be used to pass on knowl­edge. For instance, old­er, more expe­ri­enced work­ers will film tasks and leave instruc­tions in the vir­tu­al world, which new starters or less expe­ri­enced work­ers will be able to access when wear­ing AR glass­es. 

Chris Oswin, group man­ag­er of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies at the Mate­ri­als Pro­cess­ing Insti­tute, says that with­out tak­ing steps to pro­tect skills, “so much knowl­edge in the [steel] indus­try is at risk of being lost”.

Oswin goes on to explain that AR has the poten­tial to help build a library of vir­tu­al resources and expe­ri­ences that could be used to retain and pro­tect skills for gen­er­a­tions to come. 

Ulti­mate­ly, con­tin­u­ous­ly pre­serv­ing dig­i­tal skills and future-proof­ing tal­ent will be cru­cial if man­u­fac­tur­ers want to har­ness the poten­tial of IoT and not be left behind in the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion.