Beyondwork 2020
Beyondwork 2020 took place on October 21 and 22, 2020. Representatives from European politics, research, business, and labor came together to discuss questions like “What does the change in work mean for people?” and “How can companies best prepare their employees for it?”. They also exchanged views, networked, and learned from each other.
In addition to nine other research projects, the ESKODIA Team discussed the topic of "competence management", showing the increasing importance of competence management and related self-organization competencies in digitalized work environments.
The following article can be found in the “Beyondwork Online Forum”:
How do employees in industrial environments master the increasing requirements for self-organization and machine coordination arising from digitalization of their work area? To answer this question, the ESKODIA research project surveys work and responsibility profiles of employees in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with the goal of determining competency and development requirements. To do this, an app was developed with which company-related competence and qualification requirements can be determined. It results in a realistic production environment in which work processes at human-machine interfaces are demonstrated and investigated. SMEs can derive target-group-specific quality measures, implement them efficiently, and enable employees to act as coordinators in an increasingly digitalized work environment. Through interviews with academic and practitioner experts, executives, and shop-floor technicians from cooperating SMEs as well as workplace observations, the required competencies for self-organization and use of human-machine interfaces are determined. Previous results emphasize readiness to learn, problem-solving ability, capacity for teamwork, and the ability to see the big picture. These results are validated with the help of production demonstrators, so that qualification requirements can be derived and corresponding training concepts developed.