Traditional industries need new skill sets

By Dr. Alicia Martínez de Yuso and Carolina Ciprés

Advanced economies have been and remain crucially dependent on a number of fundamental industrial sectors – so fundamental and long-established, indeed, that their development needs can seem to be ignored amid the excitement and hype around new industries and technologies. These sectors include Steel, Non-Ferrous Metals, Minerals, Water, Engineering, Logistics, Ceramics, Raw Materials, Chemicals, Pulp & Paper, and Refining.

These industries have a number of features in common. Firstly they are in large part process industries, which means that they are necessarily energy-intensive: the energy required to boil or melt a material, or to initiate a chemical reaction, is dictated by the laws of physics and chemistry and is both large and irreducible, even if the process is 100% efficient (which of course it can never be due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

Carbon emission resulting from this energy use is of course a major and growing concern, but the ‘green agenda’ also recognises other issues: major carbon emissions inevitably result from, for example, the chemistry of cement production, while many of these sectors have historically been significant polluters in other ways.

Merely outsourcing these problems to other countries or continents is not an acceptable solution on either environmental or security grounds. We need our own solutions and these are likely to require a whole new set of skills.

Although basic energy requirements may be irreducible, there are other ways in which the impact of these sectors (and the cost of energy) may be mitigated through the adoption of new technologies. Alternative pathways and feedstocks may be available, for example in chemical production, or techniques can be adopted to make greater use of recycled materials (an example is the trend in the steel industry towards recycling scrap using electric arc furnaces, rather than smelting raw steel in a traditional blast furnace). And as with every industry, digitalization including AI is initiating major changes in how these processes are controlled and managed, both technically and commercially. Again, new skills are needed.

But there is another commonality across many of these sectors which is impairing their ability to attract new workers and develop new skills. Many of these industries have been in their current locations for a century or more, often for reasons such as the availability of raw materials that may no longer be relevant – on former coalfields, for instance. To raise skill levels in what are often relatively economically depressed areas, or to attract ‘new blood’ from more prosperous regions, is a big ask. The new technologies to be adopted may indeed further reduce headcount and create unemployment among workers who fail to be retrained, whilst thoughtless commentators characterising regions as ‘rustbelts’ encourage the idea that these are industries of the past, not fundamentals for a prosperous future or the basis for a rewarding career.

Recognising these problems, a new project has been initiated under the ERASMUS Plus scheme, called the Skills Alliance for the Green, Digital and Social Transformation of the Energy Intensive Industries, or Skills4EII, and ZLC is taking a valuable role. The project will build on previous work such as that of the European Steel Skills Alliance, SPIRE-SAIS (Skills Alliance for Industrial Symbiosis), and the AI-CUBE project, in several of which ZLC has also been involved, and which have begun the work of mapping the relevant and emerging new technologies and approaches, and thus identifying the new training and additional skill sets that these industries will require. Those needs will of course have regard to the environmental and social issues, not just the technologies.

As a result of these previous activities, there are many sectoral bodies and alliances already engaged, and a lot of preliminary information is available so Skills4EII should be able to hit the ground running.

Different experts are being appointed to lead in the different sectors - unsurprisingly, ZLC is the lead Logistics partner. We will be looking at logistics not only as a key element for the other industrial sectors, but also as a sector in its own right (especially since for many of these industries, the logistics both of raw materials supply and for finished goods operates in great bulk and at intercontinental level).

This year we will be analysing identified company and sector requirements and reviewing these against existing curriculums at first degree, Masters, and other forms of education and training. From this we will drill down further into the different logistics skills requirement across the board, - procurement, warehousing, transport, materials handling and so on, looking for commonalities around which viable training modules could be built while recognising that particular topics are more interesting to some sectors than to others.

So in year two we will be pulling these segments back together to develop training routes and modules, both general and tailored to the needs of specific sectors. Outputs will be released via the A.SPIRE website, (https://www.aspire2050.eu/skills4eii) . A.SPIRE is the European Association which is committed to manage and implement the Processes4Planet co-programmed Partnership which already reaches a lot of companies, and where we see a significant demand from companies and alliances looking for appropriate courses and other training provision.

For more information contact Alicia Martinez de Yuso at amartinez@zlc.edu.es