A research on hard and soft skills required to operate in a manufacturing company embracing the industry 4.0 paradigm

The requests by customers are becoming more and more complex and for this reason, much more flexible and scalable production systems are needed. This takes place in a Smart Factory where Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are implemented. Together with the numerous opportunities, some challenges arise. In particular, the major problem seems to be correlated to skills shortage. In fact, companies should bear in mind that the human capital is an essential resource that must be kept aligned with the technological advancement in order to foster their competitiveness. It has been seen that the requests in terms of competences are changing rapidly, and therefore today traditional hard skills must be enhanced by new hard skills, and these must be complementary to soft skills. For this reason, it is interesting to investigate the skills required to operate in a factory embracing the Industry 4.0 paradigm. In order to do that, we carried out a deep research on the current status of the society in general, to then look at how jobs are modifying and which types of new job profiles are arising. Moreover, we carried out a skills classification analysis in order to put the basis for future research in terms of the creation of a new skills assessment model focused on Industry 4.0 context.