CORE digital skills to resource industry 4.0
By Dr Sophie Hancock, Skills Catalyst and Pilot Lead at CORE Skills.
This article addresses the increasing critical questions faced by the resources sector as it grapples with digital transformation: What will the resources sector of tomorrow look like? How are industry professionals going to contribute value to their organisations through data science and embracing digital technologies? How can individuals ensure their skills remain both relevant and valuable?
Navigating tankers through a sea of change
Today, the mining and energy value chains are in an era of substantial disruption. Since this disruption is simultaneously coupled with increasing operational costs, it is creating large, additional demands on the people, processes, assets, and productivity within organisations. How then, is the sector supposed to meet the challenge of delivering the changes associated with the digital transformation of its people, customers, and wider societal stakeholders?
The World Economic Forum estimates the bottom line value of this disruptive activity for our sector at $425 billion by 2025 (World Economic Forum, 2017). That’s $53 billion annually, equivalent to the GDP of Uruguay in 2016 or the full market capitalisation valuation of international mining giant Glencore.
Meeting this growing challenge is made even more difficult by the need to turn-around a 33% decadal erosion of productivity in mining. Across both mining and energy, the cyclical hard-to-break habit of chasing cost-reductions has been extremely tough on the casualties of its implementation. Many companies have reduced staff numbers, and cut or deferred maintenance and capital expenditure, necessary for disciplined survival but hardly sufficient to ensure a route to sustainable future growth.
Winners in the race for transformation will find ways to harness gains in efficiency and competitiveness driven by adoption of transformative business models, technologies, and processes.
An urgent skills shortage
The data science skills shortage is urgent, and already impacting the resources and energy sector. Globally there is a need for mining and energy companies to adapt to the growth in data variety, volume, and velocity to become fully digital organisations. Here in Australia that need includes our full national geoscience and engineering workforce of over 60,000 individuals, a large percentage of whom will require upskilling to be ready for their role to deliver this collective digital capability. As well as being a large task, it is a hard task to deliver, since overcoming disruption requires holistic people and change management amid high uncertainty around our individual and collective level of preparedness to transition.
So, it is important we stop and deeply consider the questions describing the changes facing our industry. What will the resources sector of tomorrow look like? How are industry professionals going to contribute value to their organisations through data science and embracing digital technologies? How can individuals ensure their skills remain both relevant and valuable? What do leaders in this future digital organisation look like? What should resource companies be doing today to create this pathway through our ultra-connected, super intelligent, globalised future?
Meeting the need: CORE Skills
At CORE Skills, we recognise the internal training pathway to overcome the pressing data science shortfall to prepare teams for changing work. We are inspired by people and passionate about supporting these individuals and their organisations to skill into their digital future goals. We are excited to help transform business productivity at scale. We believe that we can collectively drive success by reskilling the workforce with additional skills and enable talent to combine the right new skills with their existing domain knowledge and company context.
We are working in partnership with industry and academia to deliver smarter lifelong learning for agile talent. Building capability centred around data science to achieve a successful data literacy transition will require that businesses make skills development and future workforce strategy central to their growth plans. A strong partnership comprising sector leaders from both industry and academia will ensure creation of demand-led, transformative content.
Consequently, we will deliver the CORE Skills program in 2018 to support industry’s successful digital transition addressing both leadership and professional needs.
“Getting the knowledge and understanding of what’s going to happen is essential for people in the industry. The companies and individuals that will come out on top will be the ones that equip themselves with the skills to operate in a disrupted digital world. Whether you’re a senior executive, a geologist, a line manager or an operator, you must reskill and retool yourself to be able to operate in this new world” — Ricus Grimbeek, CORE Skills Facilitator and Former CTO of South32.
We know that to have real, meaningful, positive and lasting impact to address the digital and data challenges the industry needs both strong leadership and clarity of insight and analysis from their professional teams. To deliver such an impact our Geoscientist to Data Scientist pilot is offering two, sector specific skill building products:
- A 2-day executive education program aimed at a new type of senior leader who will successfully steer companies through the approaching transition, and
- A 12-week, one day a week professionals program aimed at repurposing capability effectively to match evolving skills requirements.
Our philosophy: problem-based, student-centred learning
The CORE Skills learning model is dedicated to delivering professional skills learning opportunities and is aligned with the 21st century future of work needs. It will enable the worker to fulfil a transformative role in their organisation and the sector.
The model is founded on the need to improve the highest order of cognitive skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and making sense of data. Without the ability to conceive powerful insights, a worker has no effective means to address the important questions, and risks missing the big picture.
Course participants in our Geoscientist to Data Scientist pilot will actively engage in authentic problem-based content, such as real-world industry case studies. This gives us a framework to facilitate learning new tools and techniques, and a portal from which learners can apply multiple data sets and perspectives which is important in our increasingly integrated workplaces.
The problem-based learning approach is highly supportive of divergent thinking, has the flexibility to cater to diverse learning styles, and allows our learners to achieve their greatest personal outcomes unlimited by the scaffold of traditional short program design.
The CORE Skills trans disciplinarian course intake across mining and energy, and geoscience, technology and engineering personnel will both demand of and stimulate our learners. Through the sector specific content co-created with our industry collaborators , we are excited and driven to help determine the conditions for our industry colleagues to open their eyes and to seek new understanding and meaning from synthesising information.
They will obtain a deeper level of learning through our immersive, intensive format by hands-on learning, engaging in personal practical experience alongside a team of peers.
Research indicates that use of interactive online groups can aid in breaking down threshold concepts and enhance an individual’s own learning via posting additional materials. This informs the decision that the pilot learners will have access to a private online community communication tool hosted by CORE Skills. This enables individuals to interact with each other and course material prior to 12-week course commencement in a flipped classroom model, and further supports them both during and following the course. Participants will be encouraged to share ideas and materials, as this saves time if everyone is looking for the same information — leveraging collaborative learning for the greatest delivery of value possible to our program participants.
CORE Skills will allow regular opportunities for self-reflection in our Geoscientist to Data Scientist programs. This will be used to track our learners’ self-evaluation of progress. The final segment of each program day will be dedicated to reflection. Each learning team on the program will generate and present a progress update to the learning group. This practice will help individuals crystallise their personal takeaways and leverage that of the rest of the program by open collaboration. Learners will become clear on the TOWS of their choices during the problem-based learning — the Threats, Opportunities, Weaknesses and Strengths of their daily achievements.
This is about striving for clarity in your own thinking and operational processes, and as a team, as much as the “hard knowledge” of data visualisation and communication. These reflections will identify key findings as well as any required data or gaps in understanding to be progressed in a future program session.
“We are inspired to forge smarter upskilling pathways to enable lifelong learners in the energy and resources industries to remain adaptable and valuable,” said Dr Sophie Hancock, Skills Catalyst and Pilot Lead.
“At CORE Skills, we believe that combining existing domain knowledge and company context with the right new skills will significantly empower individuals and their organisations to create and capitalise on new opportunities. Rather than dwelling on the plethora of consulting reports and headlines out there we are actually undertaking the demanding work of doing something about it. We are proud to work with our partners to co-create high impact, original content.”
[1] World Economic Forum 2017, Digital Transformation Initiative —
Mining and Metals Industry White Paper. Available from:
http://reports.weforum.org/digital-transformation/wpcontent/
blogs.dir/94/mp/les/pages/les/wef-dti-mining-and-metalswhite-
paper.pdf. [30 May 2017].
[2] World Bank 2016, Gross Domestic Product 2016. Available from:
http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf (no 77). [20
January 2018].
CORE Innovation Hub
191 St Georges Tce, Perth WA 6000
info@corehub.com.au
CORE Innovation Hub
