Skills, competencies and literacies attributed to 4IR/Industry 4.0: Scoping review

Abstract

Much has been said about the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) or Industry 4.0 since its launch in 2011. In addition, certain skills have been touted as specifically 4IR or Industry 4.0 skills. Amidst all this, not much work has been done that focuses on and identifies what those skills are from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The current scoping review study set out to identify skills, competencies and literacies attributed to 4IR/Industry 4.0 by 64 peer-reviewed journal articles drawn from diverse subject disciplines. Three of its findings are worth mentioning. First, skills and competencies attributed to 4IR by the reviewed journal articles are generic soft skills often dubbed the 21st-century skills such as communication, creativity and problem solving. Second, of the hard skills, programming skills feature predominantly as the 4IR skills from the reviewed articles. Thirdly, information literacy is under-represented and under-cited as a skill for 4IR in the reviewed articles.

Leveraging MoyaMA, WhatsApp and Online Discussion Forum to Support Students at an Open and Distance e‑Learning University

“…Cohen's κ is a common co-efficient used to measure inter-coder reliability (Cohen, 1960;Sun, 2011;Chaka, 2019a;Chaka, Lephalala and Ngesi, 2017). The three raters' coding reliability was .80, which according to Cohen's κ value weightings (.00 to .1) is excellent (Cohen, 1960;Chaka, 2019a;Chaka et al, 2017).…”

“…In this sense, it embodies, especially within the ODL context, a shift from the use of traditional technologies such as telephone and radio which characterised the old form of ODL, to the use and adoption of digital and emerging technologies in the ODL arena. This usage does not foreground the different digital revolutions and historical trajectories often associated with the digital age as such aspects are not the focus of this study (Barnatt, 2001;Chaka, 2019aChaka, , 2019bTait, 2014). Tait (2014) cites print, text, electricity, transport and radio as examples of technologies that dominated the old form of ODL, which was correspondence or first generation ODL.…”

Explorando habilidades requeridas para la industria 4.0: Un enfoque orientado al trabajador

“…Within this rapid transformation process, several scholars underline the need to uncover the skills that workforce re-quires to adapt to organizational demands linked to this new technological revolution (e.g., Kipper, Furstenau, Hoppe, Frozza, & Iepsen, 2020;Oztemel & Gursev, 2020;Pacchini, Facchini, & Mummolo, 2019), as the integration of such technologies with the workforce is a key element to ensure organizational effectiveness (Ackerman & Kanfer, 2020;Kanfer & Blivin, 2019). Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest about the skills in the industry 4.0 as can be noted from recent literature reviews on research in this topic (e.g., Chaka, 2020;Maisiri, Darwish, & van Dyk, 2020;Prifti, Knigge, Kienegger, & Krcmar, 2017). For instance, considerable efforts from psychological research have been made to identify and assess the required skills in the digital age, thus providing valuable information on how relevant are some skills for university students and employees from traditional work settings (e.g., Herde, Lievens, Solberg, Strong, & Burkholder, 2019;Strong et al, 2020).…”

Preparing Students for the Fourth Industrial Revolution through Mathematical Learning

“…them for the challenges in the 4IR environment will however be inadequate. A diverse range of skills or competencies, collectively dubbed as 21 st century competencies that include but are not limited to cognitive and social-emotional competencies (or "soft" skills) like problem solving, communication skills, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, decision making, and self-direction, are also identified by many researchers as important for the 4IR (see Chaka, 2020 for a scoping review). These affective, dispositional, and volitional competencies will be necessary when working with complex, messy work situations that may have unknown or many solutions, and that require flexible and adaptive problem-solving skills.…”

“…In our search for possible competency frameworks that could inform us on how such environments can be designed, we leveraged the one proposed by the "US Committee on Defining Deeper Learning and 21 st Century Skills" (Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012), where 21 st century competencies are defined as transferable skills and knowledge "that are specific to -and intertwined with -knowledge within a particular domain of content and performance" (p. 3). Three broad domains of 21 st century competencies -cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal -were identified, and these resonated with the hard and soft skills necessary for the 4IR and the 21 st century workplace (Chaka, 2020;Gravemeijer et al, 2017;Ra et al, 2019;WEF, 2020). Adapting from the framework, we argue that the competencies that are important to be developed in the mathematics classrooms include the following:…”