Production Engineering Competencies in the Industry 4.0 context: Perspectives on the Brazilian labor market

Abstract

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1 Introduction The Production Engineer, as defined by the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC) and CONFEA (Federal Council for Engineering and Agronomy), is a professional who is able to perform a range of activities within industrial manufacturing methods and production lines, and other related services (Conselho Federal de Engenharia e Agronomia, 1973; 1975). These activities include coordination, planning, feasibility studies, technical services, audits, research and teaching, budget preparation, quality monitoring, among others. Notwithstanding this broad characterization, the specific skills and competencies of Production Engineers seemed to be clear. However, with the emergence of Industry 4.0 and the digitalization involved, these definitions must be revised and updated. As emphasized by Block et al. (2018), historically, as companies' expertise has grown, employees seldom have the necessary competencies to implement digitalization. Murawski & Bick (2017) add that employees working in knowledge-intensive jobs will need to acquire a certain degree of digital competence to be able to work in the digital age. Therefore, the discussion about employee's qualification is relevant although there are few researches that discuss competencies in Industry 4.0. According to Shamim et al. (2016), there is plenty of literature on Information Systems and Information Technology competencies, but no great amount on Industry 4.0 required competencies.