Future Skills with Jeff Connolly and Aleksandar Subic: discover the Industry 4.0 Apprenticeship Program

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Australia, like most advanced economies, is dealing with skills gaps and mismatches due to rapid technological changes that are disrupting the work landscape. In this interview, Jeff Connolly, Chairman and CEO of Siemens Australia and Pacific, and Aleksandar Subic, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (STEM College) & Vice President Digital Innovation at RMIT University, explain the Industry 4.0 Apprenticeship Program in Australia. The initiative aims to boost digital skills in the country and develop future-ready talents through a learning program held by a network of universities and industries. On July 14, the GFCC is releasing a new report, Future Skills: Lessons and Insights from a Review of Innovative Skills and Development Initiatives. The launching will happen during the Frame the Future of Talent. Mr. Subic will participate in the conversation, commenting about the program. This publication is part of a sequence of materials featured in the report.

GFCC: How did you get to the concept and implementation of the Industry 4.0 Apprenticeship Program? What was the problem that you were trying to solve?

Jeff Connolly: There was discourse in Australia about the lack of job-ready education outcomes. A person would do an undergraduate degree, go to a large organization and that organization would say: “I need to invest another two to three years to make this person job-ready.” I think the success achieved in this program is because it’s an integrated model that breaks down those barriers.

Aleksander Subic: We also saw for ourselves the dynamics of transformation in the industry due to digitalization with whole sectors of manufacturing and other sectors entering. We basically conceptualized an advanced apprenticeship program which is also a new form of apprenticeship.

Jeff: There’s a bit of background we should consider too. There was a Prime Minister’s Taskforce put together via an agreement between the Australian Government and the German Government, to look at how Australia could leverage the work of the Germans on Industry 4.0. It covered several aspects, including the future of work and education. After twelve months of work, we focused on getting that component kicked off in a meaningful way.

GFCC: And what was your conclusion? What are the levers that you pulled? What did you and your colleagues decide to do in practice to build an impactful initiative?

Jeff: Siemens is the largest automation company in the world and also the largest industrial software company — including areas such as design, engineering collaboration, simulation, and integration of cyber-physical systems. We granted software licenses to each of the six universities participating in the network and the institutions built curricula around those future-oriented, state-of-the-art, industry-standard tools. We also provided access to the key curriculum from the Siemens Professional Education Centre in Berlin.

GFCC: When you said in the beginning that you felt the need in Australia to address the industry readiness gap was that more linked to soft skills or hard skills?

Aleksandar: In terms of hard skills, we realized that there’s a need for far more advanced, comprehensive digitalization skills dealing with digital systems, integrating digital systems, developing digital twins, understanding how you can create autonomy intelligence within an industrial Internet of Things environment. We also realized that there was a level of soft skills needed to deal with complexity and work with far more diverse and geographically dispersed teams of technical and non-technical people.

Jeff: It would be fair to say in many countries we need more STEM skills. The realization in this particular program is we need more people that can operate in a real-world environment, use the tools, and work with different types of people by integrating hard and soft skills. They don’t necessarily need to write the source code for an algorithm. The bulk of the jobs that are going to be needed are the ones that are actually down the stream from there but they do need to know what’s possible and how to get it done.

Aleksandar: In Australia, 95% of our manufacturing companies are small to medium enterprises. The future workforce has a key role to play in working within those companies, contributing at different levels, integrating different types of knowledge and helping transformation. In many cases, it will be about knowing what’s possible and then applying the skills with the right tools to make that a reality.

Jeff: In Australia, we didn’t have the benefit of the advanced apprenticeship approach in the German dual-education model. The model of moving students back and forth between a formal classroom in an educational institution and a real company, putting knowledge into practice through an accredited higher education program did not exist here in this way previously.

GFCC: Have you worked in building the industry partnerships for the program to be delivered right when you talk about workplace learning? What were the dynamics of building the alliances and partnerships needed for that? That was certainly a critical factor.

Aleksander: This initial pilot was a partnership with the Swinburne University of Technology, The Australian Industry Group, and Siemens. From the outset, when we were developing the pilot and implementing the first phase of the program, Siemens focused on ensuring the participation of their supply-chain partners and arranging placement opportunities that were aligned with a common standard. In fact, Siemens even had its own staff member appointed to work with the university to ensure that was achieved. So, we’ve had co-management roles and co-coordination roles between the university and Siemens, and working with various industry partners. This work is ongoing and complex. We have now expanded the pilot across a national network of universities including RMIT, University of Western Australia, University of Tasmania, and the University of Technology Sydney, and have moved beyond the Diploma programs to degree programs as part of our scale-up strategy. The network of universities engaging with industry more broadly beyond the initial pilot is a major milestone to see this program deliver real national benefits at scale.

Jeff: The decision to have grants for universities was key. Because of our scale, when Siemens said we would provide significant grants of our hi-tech industrial software, the Federal Government said if the university committed to develop the curriculum and implement the program, it would help fund universities to build physical environments, the test labs, for new technologies and skills development. These Industry 4.0 Test Labs led by Aleks are environments designed to engage with both students and industry so that Australian companies could continue to build Industry 4.0 capability by seeing what good looks like; by seeing what is possible in an Industry 4.0 environment with many different applications. This was all possible because of trusted long-established relationships.

GFCC: Let’s talk a bit about the participants. What are their profiles? How did you select them?

Jeff: Siemens helped recruit students in the pilot stage, people with different backgrounds, coming from industry, coming from university and coming directly out of secondary school. For example, we had students who had two or three years of practical experience and had undergraduate degrees in engineering, but also participants who didn’t have access to higher education and even some who were working in industry in areas such as geology but didn’t see their future in that direction. We even had a beautician.

Aleksandar: The interview process was designed to uncover their motivation, their thinking, their maturity, their ideas. It’s a different approach than what a traditional education system would have. Having an income whilst learning was critical for many of them who had to support their independence, or their families and traditional university just wasn’t an option.

GFCC: Could you share some figures on the scale of the program? How do you scale the two sides of your platform: industry and university? What are you doing to expand?

Aleksandar: We initially implemented the Industry 4.0 Apprenticeship Program through a Diploma program and then expended this model across the network via an associate degree program. We’re now running the associate degree program with a few hundred students trained and we launched a master’s degree, which has another 500–600 students. We are expanding the whole initiative and deploying various programs across a national network of partner universities. Within a few years, our vision across the nation would be to reach a cohort of thousands of students going through a related grad and undergrad continuum which incorporates Industry 4.0 curriculum and skills.

Jeff: A critical aspect of the future success is to have partners to scale up. Outside of the Siemens business chain, in Australia there’s the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre. They have over 1000 contact points with SMEs in this space. You also have The Australian Industry Group with over 60,000 members for example. These groups are all part of looking at how we expand the nation’s capability when it comes to advanced manufacturing and Industry 4.0. Many companies need these types of skills in their workforce urgently. If you take a company like BAE, British Aerospace, for example, they’re building frigates in Australia and need people who have skills in the latest technologies. Or even smaller engineering companies like DEACAM who provide technology and digital solutions to the craft brewing industry — they also need people with the right skills and expertise to help their customers digitalize and grow. Our pharmaceutical and chemical industries need people who have knowledge about advanced manufacturing so they can build greater sovereign capability for instance. There have also been additional funding announcements by the Federal Education Minister to support expanding the programs in the national network of participating universities. Success will come through collaboration.

GFCC: When you scale the program up and place students in different companies, they will have different experiences. How do you do quality assurance?

Jeff: We’re working to build a national network and no doubt the programs will continue to evolve as we continue to learn and as the world continues to change. I mentioned the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre before… that and other organizations are critical nodes located in manufacturing clusters across the country. There is an actual natural magnetism for people working and interested in the manufacturing space. For example the Dulux Group in Australia have one of the most advanced paint manufacturing facilities in the world and this requires a completely different type of workforce. One which is more comfortable with a computer tablet and operating a paperless manufacturing facility than people who can lift heavy bags of raw ingredients. We are weaving the network, connecting as many hubs as possible, leveraging demand and expertise. For example, HeliMods, an advanced helicopter aerospace company in Queensland who use digital twin technology to innovate and supply critical solutions around the world, is now working with the University of Queensland — one of our national network of universities. We need this holistic and interconnected view to really bring this topic of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) to life for Australian business.

Aleksander: And we’ve been sharing the learnings, sharing the information, sharing the model actively through the network because we work very closely together. So basically, all those industry partners or potential industry partners are via those clusters, those hubs inducted into the model, inducted into that philosophy, inducted into the practice that we’ve been developing, and in a way that practice is becoming standard practice. We’ve now brought the whole work stream model under the umbrella of the Australian Industry Group, which involves, more than 60,000 companies and businesses.

GFCC: This is amazing. But I imagine you faced many challenges along the way. Could you comment a bit about that and maybe the challenge that you foresee going forward to scale the program up?

Aleksandar: From my perspective, the biggest challenge was to work across the artificial boundaries of universities, business and other institutions: to really connect all the stakeholders in a kind of a seamless ecosystem approach. This had to be done in a strategic and non-competitive way with the goal of creating a national capability. Going forward, the biggest challenge is to scale up and expand beyond the initial network of universities. We have over 40 universities in Australia and New Zealand. True impact and scale will only be achieved if we bring more partners on board and I’m please to say that this is underway.

Jeff: It is important that this is not seen as a technology specific approach. The worst thing that could happen is to have somebody saying: “Well, Industry 4.0 is yesterday’s news. We’re going to Industry 5.0.” I think that actually would be an indicator of a complete misunderstanding of what we’re talking about. As an overarching issue, postsecondary institutions will need to continuously focus on the provision of a series of accreditations through a lifelong journey of accreditation, and it’s not just limited to the delivery of a standard undergraduate degrees. The minute you stand still with your knowledge is the minute you go backwards. A growth mindset requires a continuous focus and interest in learning, and people who have this mindset will ensure our region remains competitive and prosperous.