3rd ICAI 2024

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2024

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

3.3 The interviews with the L&D experts Upskilling and reskilling workers can provide a solution to the challenge of declining middle-skilled and low-skilled jobs, enabling them to adapt to the evolving demands of a greener and more technologically advanced economy. Both upskilling and reskilling offer pathways to equip the existing workforce with not only these new competencies, thereby preserving employment and maintaining industry competitiveness but also there is a need for purpose-driven education, life-long learning, and empowerment especially of the most vulnerable ones (Holman & Švejdarová, 2023). The authors advocate for an integrative learning approach, emphasizing both practical skills and a broader understanding of societal impacts as lifelong learning, creativity, and adapting to external changes, which are essential for upskilling and reskilling workers in advanced technologies. The emphasis on understanding of wholeness, transformative and unifying learning capacities, and the systematic approach to education align with the collaborative efforts between industry, educational institutions, and governments. From a perspective that appreciates the complete understanding of reality, it is crucial to differentiate between a holistic and a wholistic viewpoint. Utilizing wholeness systems thinking, the wholistic perspective is distinct from the holistic approach that mainly dives into the internal dynamics of systems without sufficient consideration of consequences coming from the external environment. The wholistic approach in Sustainable Education acknowledges the vital influence of the external environment on the purposeful limits and functions of the studied systems’ behavior, encompassing both their components and interactions. This model advocates for an integrative learning approach, stressing practical skills and societal impacts, thereby offering a pathway for equipping the workforce with new competencies while driving toward a purpose-driven and sustainable future (Holman & Švejdarová, 2023). Three semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with Learning and Development (L&D) experts, consisting of two men and one woman. Among these experts, two have over five years of experience in the automotive industry, and one has more than ten years of experience. Following is the list of all final codes: unique employee education needs, challenges in upskilling and reskilling, emerging topics such as E-mobility, sustainability, and new work methods, Generation Z’s expectations for future employers, effective development of technical skills through hands-on experience and online micro-courses, the concept of Just Transition principles, the importance of balancing theory and practice in education, the shift towards flexible learning, strategies for adapting to technological innovations, industry collaboration and benchmarking, soft skills development, the role of education in corporate strategy, diversity and inclusion in education, preparedness for future challenges, fostering creativity development, acquiring IT and digitization skills, environmental awareness, collaboration with educational institutions, and implementing wholistic education strategies for a sustainable industrial transition. Based on the final codes from the experts, we developed broader theories or explanations that can help us understand the overarching themes and connections between these codes.

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