Skills, competencies and literacies attributed to 4IR/Industry 4.0: Scoping review

Abstract

Much has been said about the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) or Industry 4.0 since its launch in 2011. In addition, certain skills have been touted as specifically 4IR or Industry 4.0 skills. Amidst all this, not much work has been done that focuses on and identifies what those skills are from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The current scoping review study set out to identify skills, competencies and literacies attributed to 4IR/Industry 4.0 by 64 peer-reviewed journal articles drawn from diverse subject disciplines. Three of its findings are worth mentioning. First, skills and competencies attributed to 4IR by the reviewed journal articles are generic soft skills often dubbed the 21st-century skills such as communication, creativity and problem solving. Second, of the hard skills, programming skills feature predominantly as the 4IR skills from the reviewed articles. Thirdly, information literacy is under-represented and under-cited as a skill for 4IR in the reviewed articles.