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1. Introduction and motivation
The new paradigm of Industry 4.0 is rapidly spreading worldwide. This revolutionary concept offers the story of the next Industrial Revolution as a flexible platform where technologies and the Internet are pervasive means to do businesses and manufacturing.
Efforts have been made to propose future tendencies and shifts in terms of technologies, systems and tools. However, there still seems to be a lack of considerations for future workers, especially at a holistic view. In other words, there is a need for a corresponding term and scenario for humans in parallel to Industry 4.0. To address this need, the following questions demand an answer:
How does the future interaction and communication look like for employees in a manufacturing company? What type of new structure and activities may arise from such new interactions?
What is the best term to represent an inclusive set of future-proofing attributes of the workforce?
What are the competences required for this new paradigm shift?
The research reported in this paper attempts to answer these questions by having carried out a state-of-the-art review. This methodology allows both to address a wide literature and topic, and to highlight perspectives for further research (Grant and Booth, 2009), which resonates with the aim of this paper.
In this sense, the work presented elaborates on the new changes at the factory atmosphere, such as its architecture levels and the workforce interactions. Furthermore, it also proposes a new approach and term with a human-focused perspective in order to meet the challenges of the future labour force. This new term is “Human Capital 4.0”. This is a holistic approach of the human force worth considering for different aspects required for a successful adoption of Industry 4.0. Lastly, we present a novel competence model to enhance the understanding and application of every type of skill.
The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents state-of-the-art literature on existing terminologies within Industry 4.0, the factory structure, the workforce architecture and interactions and the review of human capital and competences. Section 3 provides the results and discussion to the three initial questions to be answered. Section 4 gives conclusion and further implications of the results. Section 5 mentions the limitations of the...