Characterization of Tasks and Skills of Workers, Middle and Top Managers in the Industry 4.0 Context

Abstract

This study intends to make a characterization of the main tasks and skills needed to face the Industry 4.0. Moreover, it gives special attention to the different company’s hierarchical levels. To achieve the goals of this paper, a methodology based on Collaborative Decision Making method was used. Firstly, thirty participants were interviewed to understand their point of views. Next, they were split into Group Works to refine the results. Finally, a Group Concordance took place to create the final list of tasks and skills. The skills were organized into four categories: Technical, Social, Methodological and Personal. The results show different requirements in each level. In the Workers level, due to the presence of more technical tasks, eight of the top ten skills belong to the Technical category. In the Middle Managers level, there are tasks of both leading and analyzing nature and thus the top ten skills needed are split through the four categories. Finally, in the Top Managers level, due to the presence of mainly strategy tasks, the top ten skills are split between the Methodological and Social categories. To the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to use a Collaborative Decision Making methodology to develop a set of tasks and skills that future work environments will demand on the different hierarchical levels of the organization.

Problem Solving and Decision-Making Skills for ESD: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Therefore, learning should focus on fostering integrative problem-solving and decision-making skills for implementing education for sustainable development. This was because the skills were crucial in the Industry 4.0 era due to being extensively adopted by workers and managers (Torres, Pimentel and Matias, 2023). Learning including real-world problems also stimulated active student engagement in applying their individual and cognitive knowledge in collaborative problem-solving (Erol et al, 2016).…”

“…Based on the aforementioned descriptions, problem-solving and decision-making skills are the methodological competencies required for future success (Erol et al, 2016). This indicated that collaborative decision-making skills were needed in the industrial era 4.0 (Torres, Pimentel and Matias, 2023). The methodological competencies were also selected as essential and relevant characteristics for physics careers (Nasri, Nasri and Talib, 2020), with decision-making skills closely related to the abilities of critical thinking (Molokhina, Pishchik and Fomin, 2021) and communication (Tsai et al, 2020).…”