by Rachael McCorriston from JLR
The workshop on Robotics included representatives from training organisations in Germany, as well as in Turkey and Macedonia. It was part of the SKILLMAN international conference that took place in San Sebastian, Spain on 8 November 2017. The workshop was supported by a SKILLMAN ambassador from the UK, Christian Warden who is Group Head of Skills Development for the Manufacturing Technology Centre in the United Kingdom.
Christian offered his support and advice on the robotics skills gaps and talked about how to tackle challenges in this area.
The purpose of the workshop was to highlight the challenges of the robotics skills gap and to examine how SKILLMAN has managed to work through and help find responses to these challenges, as well as examine how each Member State will look to roll out the robotics qualification which has so recently achieved NVQ and EQF status.
The workshop started with a presentation by Paula Cresswell from BMET college who spoke about the piloting training courses and highlighted some of the outputs which frequently included more than a 50% increase in distance travelled following attendance on the training. This was followed by a presentation by David Morgan from EAL who highlighted the qualification and talked about how there was now an opportunity for companies to roll this out across the European Union.
Rachael McCorriston from JLR highlighted the output of the Observatory on Robotics Programming and its concerns on the current skills gaps challenges in robotics and how Skillman was
serving a purpose in addressing these gaps. The researcher from Germany was particularly interested and representatives from Turkey highlighted the robotics skills gap as being of key importance in their economy and the group had a lively discussion about associated countries of the EU and their role also in promoting the successes of the Erasmus+ programme to showcase best practice.
