By Dr. Teresa De La Cruz and Dr. Susana Val
Two hundred years ago this year, England’s Stockton and Darlington Railway ushered in a revolution in transport for both passengers and goods traffic. Since then there have been many further transformations – the bicycle and then the motor car brought personal mobility to the masses; long distance travel saw the rise of the steam ship, only to be overtaken, at least for passengers, by the airliner; the tram and then the bus redefined urban transport while containerisation revolutionised freight at all levels.
These and other changes didn’t just affect transport users – they had profound implications for employment, and not always in predictable ways. For example, while containerisation decimated docker and stevedore employment as expected, few of the early railway pioneers foresaw that the new technology would create a century-long boom for the old-fashioned horse and cart!
Nor did novel technologies simply eliminate traditional jobs – they also created demand for entirely new occupations with very different skill sets, at every level from manual labourers to the managerial and professional levels.
This remains true as we begin to address further new trends in transport and mobility, both of passengers and of freight (and increasingly, the two considered together rather than as separate activities). We are looking at the emergence of Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM).
CCAM will not just be about new technologies, such as drones, autonomous ground-level vehicles or self-driving cabs, (which are already available given suitable regulatory frameworks). It is also and perhaps more importantly about novel ways of providing and accessing mobility, allowing demand-driven connectivity, promoting effective collaboration among user and provider communities, pooling the strengths and capabilities of different modes and systems cooperatively, and using the power of AI and other information technologies to optimise planning, scheduling, routing, service provision and customer access.
These developments are potentially threatening to many existing jobs in the mobility sector but equally, if properly managed, moves towards CCAM should generate many new employment opportunities.
Recognising this, the European Commission is funding from the Horizon Europe budget a three year research initiative to empower both workforces and businesses in the freight and passenger mobility sectors to enable them to cope with and benefit from the changes that CCAM adoption will bring about. RESKILLING (for once, not an awkward acronym but simply what it says) will propose, implement and validate a range of novel tools and services which can guide the enhancement and adaptation of workforce skills to meet CCAM needs while promoting employment growth.
So RESKILLING will not just analyse the detail of the skills and capabilities that are going to be required but view these in their wider socio-economic contexts across the whole value chain, to ensure that not only are opportunities leveraged, but also that the inevitable drawbacks are mitigated. There will be new business models, mechanisms and training tools for enhancing and adapting skills, and which will be scalable, replicable and transferable across the mobility sector and throughout the EU. The aim is not just to ensure that workforces (and the businesses or mobility operators that depend on them) have adequate skills and competencies, but that these help create capabilities for further innovation (including social innovation) and support business models that will boost innovation, CAM deployment and development and, ultimately, economic growth.
RESKILLING was launched in January and ZLC has been appointed to lead one of the RESKILLING work packages, focusing on the short, medium, and long term employment and socio-economic implications of CCAM particularly as these affect special workforce groups such as the professions. This will include identifying and mapping the jobs, professions and skillsets involved both currently and in the future (not as straightforward as it sounds). We will also go on to develop training modules to update and enhance identified CCAM-specific professional skill requirements.
For more information, please contact Dr. Teresa de la Cruz, [email protected]
