Alliance for Strategic Skills addressing Emerging Technologies in Defence

Industry 4.0, business digitalisation, artificial intelligence and KETs are increasingly taking centre stage, not as buzzwords but as pillars for innovation in all business sectors at a global level. The defence sector is no exception.Accordingly, all players involved in this field are experiencing evolution in business processes and human resources: the former in regard to technological advancements; the latter regarding the skills needed to exploit such technologies in the proper way.In particular, human resources need to possess or develop new knowledge, abilities, and competences to help companies complete the quantum leap which is expected from the “fourth industrial revolution”. The problem facing the European defence industry is twofold: (i) it is experiencing difficulty in finding the necessary skills in order to sustain its leadership, competitiveness and sustainability in the medium- to long-term; (ii) aging staff and difficulties in engaging and keeping young professionals are preventing the sector from reshaping company capabilities and creating new, attractive job opportunities for talented workers of any age.ASSETs+ project aspires to build a sustainable human resources supply chain which allows defence companies to innovate by both attracting highly-skilled young workers and upskilling their employees thanks to customised, complementary education & training programmes addressing three main technologies: Robotics, C4ISTAR and Cybersecurity aspects related to the first two.The project will focus on 4 main activities:Skill Strategy to translate the selected technologies into actionable sets of relevant fine-grained skills to be (potentially) transformed into new job profiles;Design of three training programmes to address high-school students, university students, employees;E&T programme realisation and improvement;Development of community of practice (i) and body of knowledge (ii) to promote new skills acquisition, development and retention