"Twin Transition" – Necessary Changes in Public and Company-Internal Education and Training.

Abstract:

Title:          "Twin Transition" – Necessary Changes in Public and Company-Internal Education and Training.

Question (Purpose)

The transformation of the global automotive industry (as a key industry in the manufacturing sector) is a twin transition: digitization & electrification.

To be successful, appropriately qualified and motivated employees are required and therefore it is necessary to implement some changes in public and in-house education and training. The perspective of this presentation is on these necessary changes in education and training. The implementation of such changes will also be an important prerequisite for emerging or slower countries to skip stages of development, i.e. to leapfrog.

The changes concern all phases of education: primary, secondary and tertiary, and company-internal education and training.

This presentation will outline some of these changes based on the author's decades of experience in the automotive industry.

Methodology (Design)

Lessons from history and experience:
Agriculture – Craftsmanship – Manufacturing – Industry 4.0.

Main Results (Findings)

For Colleges and Universities:

(1) Dual study programs offer more practical, detailed and concrete insights, motivation and inspiration related to industrial practice, than theoretical teaching.

A Dual Study Program is a university degree program with integrated practical placements in companies and is defined by two learning locations: company and college/university,
or more formally:
"is a university program with substantial and structured practical components that are assigned to the theoretical education", and it results in an academic degree from a university or college.

(2) Cross-disciplinary understanding concerning industrial processes, two examples:

(2a) Software and AI as opposed to "hardware" and physical processes: casting, welding, painting, assembling, …

• There is no software or AI-tool that produce cars, food, clothes, pharmaceuticals, ...
• Efficient production of cars, food, clothes, pharmaceuticals, ... is not possible without software or AI-tools.

(2b) For all productive processes (including at home), a basic understanding of efficiency (I.E.) and ergonomics is beneficial.

For Qualification and Training of Employees:

• Empower, motivate and encourage all employees to program and implement software to do their jobs better!
  Examples from China are presented that show that this leads to a major digitization step for the entire company. In particular, maintenance technicians are able to implement everyday solutions to improve reliability (OEE), durability of production equipment and to improve production quality. (In Europe, there are many obstacles – by law and by company rules – hindering that empowerment.)
• Ongoing;
  Development of branch- & job-dependent best-practices for the use of AI-tool.

For School Education:

The three Rs for the basic skills taught in schools (Reading, wRiting, and ARithmetic) must be expanded to include a "P" or another "R" for PRogramming!

Programming is propositional logic/calculus utilizing a suitable (programming language) syntax and some IO-functions. Anyone who can learn arithmetic can also learn programming – even at primary school.

During the course of the school, basic programming skills are expanded through the use of mathematical packages/libraries corresponding to the teaching topics in mathematics.

Of course and as usual:
During school progress, the basics of industrial processes must be learned:
physics, chemistry, biology; i.e. STEM/MINT-related topics (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics / Mathematics, Information & Natural sciences, Technology).

Significance (Practical and Theoretical Implications).

This presentation proposes changes to schools, colleges/universities, corporate training and labor relations that affect software development and are necessary to prepare students and employees to understand, contribute to and promote change and "twin transition" in the manufacturing industry.