Addressing the Industry 4.0 Skills Gap

On 30 October the Erasmus+ project Icarus kicked off with a project meeting in Malta. The Icarus project, coordinated by the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Malta, is in partnership with the Free University of Bolzano, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, University of Minho and the Politehnica University of Bucharest. The project partners met in Malta to discuss the challenges faced by educators and learners within higher education institutions in teaching subjects relating to Industry 4.0.

The uptake of digital manufacturing technologies within industry has increased considerably in recent years, but engineers do not always have the necessary skills and knowledge to enable the implementation of innovative and cutting edge solutions. Industry stakeholders in fact keep on pointing out that they struggle to find personnel with the required knowledge, in order to develop state-of-the-art solutions.

This project aims specifically at addressing those skills gaps by developing openly accessible training material which can be used by both educators and learners alike over the two-and-a-half-year-project. During the meeting the partners discussed how this can be feasibly achieved during the timeframe of the Icarus project. They also discussed how to implement innovative pedagogic solutions in order to improve the efficacy of knowledge transfer.