2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 67: A guide for Generation Z students to meet the Future Skills requirements of Industry 4.0

Presented at Continuing Professional Development Division (CPD) Poster Session

The future characteristics of the work, workplace, and workforce in Industry 4.0 are unpredictable, as are the Future Skills that Generation Z workers will need in the coming years. International reports by the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggest that this situation will affect resolving urgent societal needs due to the unknown impact of skills mismatch and lead to potential workforce talent shortages. There are two latent challenges to face the disruptive changes of Industry 4.0 that show the urgency to make the training of Generation Z students more flexible in Futures Skills. The first is that most of the curricular programs of Higher Education Institutions continue to have a strong predominance of "silo-ism" thinking, with a rigid degree of specialization and a marked differentiation of disciplines. The second is that the current skills frameworks are static taxonomies that cannot explain how to make the necessary adjustments so that Higher Education Institutions can train students in the innovative and more efficient processes, products, and services required by Industry 4.0. This Work-in-Progress study aims to design a dynamic model of the skills taxonomy of Industry 4.0 on an open-source, flexible, and updatable platform. The platform, driven by Machine Learning tools, will be based on Futures Studies to forecast labor market requirements. The system will use information from the ESCO (European Skills, Competences, and Occupations), the O*NET (Occupational Information Network) frameworks, and the Strategic Intelligence platform of the World Economic Forum. The Future Skills considered in the study are related to Subject and individual development skills (self-efficacy, self-initiative, self-management, and autonomous learning competence); Object-related skills (tolerance for ambiguity, digital literacy, critical thinking, and creativity); and Organization-related skills (communication and cooperation competence and future mindset). Preliminary findings show that the Dynamic Model can serve as an international reference guide for designing the 2030 educational approaches of active and experiential learning in Higher Education Institutions.

Authors

Patricia Caratozzolo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7488-6703 Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico [biography]

Patricia Caratozzolo received the Ph.D. degree from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Barcelona. She is Full Member of the Institute for the Future of Education and Assistant Professor at Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico. She leads projects in the area of Educational Innovation, Critical Thinking, Cognitive Flexibility, and development of Social Oriented Interdisciplinary Skills in STEAM. Dr. Caratozzolo is Senior Member of IEEE, Member of the Executive Committee of the Mexican Chapter of the Organization of Women in Sciences for the Developing World (OWSD), Member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) of the Mexican Council of Educational Research (CONACYT), and Vice President of the International Association of Continuing Engineering Education (IACEE).
Luis Alberto Mejía-Manzano Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM)
Gabriela Sirkis PhD Universidad del CEMA
Jorge Rodriguez-Ruiz Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM)
Julieta Noguez PhD School of Engineering and Sciences, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico [biography]

Julieta Noguez is a professor-researcher at the Computer Science Department of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City Campus. She obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Tecnológico de Monterrey. She is co-leader of the Advanced Artificial Intelligence research group. She is responsible for the Cyber-Learning & Data Sciences Lab. She belongs to the National Research System of Mexico (SNI level II), the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Education Society, the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence, and the Mexican Academy of Computing. She got 3 awards (2 Gold winners and 1 silver winner) for her participation in the Project “Open Innovation Laboratory for Rapid Realization for Sensing, Smart, and Sustainable Products”. QS Stars Reimagine Education. She obtained seven first-place awards for Educational Innovation from Tecnologico de Monterrey. She has published more than 150 research articles in international journals and conferences. She has directed 12 doctoral theses and 14 master's theses. Her research interests are data science and artificial intelligence in Education.
Jorge Membrillo-Hernández Institute for the future of Education, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico [biography]

Jorge Membrillo Hernández obtained his PhD from King's College of the University of London, United Kingdom and carried out postdoctoral research stays at the Universities of Sheffield, in the United Kingdom, and at Harvard University, in the United States. He is currently a Full Time Researcher at the Institute for the Future of Education and the Bioengineering Department of the School of Engineering and Sciences of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City Campus. He has published 86 indexed scientific research articles and has more than 2000 citations, he has specialized in Challenge-Based Learning and the TEC 21 educational model. He is currently the President of the International Society for Engineering Pedagogy in its chapter Mexico. He has participated in more than 50 conferences on Education. Dr. Membrillo-Hernández has implemented innovative teaching strategies such as Global Classroom with Universities in Argentina, Colombia, Spain and Canada. He has additionally developed Augmented Reality strategies for his classes and has also developed multiple investigations on Socially Oriented Education. He belongs to the National System of Researchers, Level 1 and belongs to the circle of distinguished professors of the Tecnológico de Monterrey.
Patricia Vázquez-Villegas [biography]

Dr. Patricia Vázquez-Villegas has a bachelor’s degree in the Food Sciences Engineering program and a Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from Tecnologico de Monterrey. She has experience working in the development and application of sustainable platforms for the purification and detection of biomarkers. Has made research internships at the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia and the Water Center for Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2018 she was Coordinator at the Writing Lab of the Institute for the Future of Education. She is the co-author of 29 ISI indexed scientific publications, 1 book, 2 book chapters, and co-inventor of 4 intellectual properties. She is a member of the Mexican National System of Researchers. Her contributions in the field of sustainability have been in biotechnology, cereal sciences, energy efficiency; and active learning in education. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1568-4954

Download paper (1020 KB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session

For those interested in:

Academia-Industry Connections