Development of Engineering Personnel in the Era
of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Оlga А. Shvetsova
School of Industrial Management
Korea University of Technology and Education
(KOREATECH)
Shv_olga@rambler.ru
Abstract— The process of transformation of the competence
approach under the conditions of the 4th Industrial Revolution is
being investigated. The trends in the development of a new era of
the industrial revolution are explored, new prospects for the
development of world and domestic production and technologies
are revealed. The model of development of engineering personnel
on the example of South Korean companies is considered. The
shortcomings and advantages of modern approaches to the
formation and management of the professional competences of
engineering personnel are discussed. Recommendations are
proposed for improving the competence model in the context of
the globalization of industrial economies.
Keywords— competence; engineering personnel; IV Industrial
Revolution; South Korea; competency model
I. INTRODUCTION
Economists are increasingly saying that the world is on the
threshold of the fourth industrial revolution.
One of the main themes of the World Economic Forum in
recent years was the Fourth Industrial Revolution - 27
meetings of the Fund in 2017 were devoted to Industry 4.0 [1].
This name was given to the present era of innovation, when
advanced technologies radically change entire sectors of the
economy at a stunningly fast pace.
There will emerge a completely new type of industrial
production, which will be based on so-called large data and
their analysis, complete automation of production,
technologies of augmented reality, the Internet of things. It is
assumed that these cyber physical systems will be integrated
into one network, communicate with each other in real time,
adjust them and learn new behaviors.
They will be able to build production with fewer mistakes,
interact with the goods produced and, if necessary, adapt to
the new needs of consumers. For example, a product in the
production process can itself determine the equipment capable
of producing it, while in a fully autonomous mode without
human participation [2].
All these changes and trends require the formation of a
new model of professional and managerial competencies of
development engineers and exploiters of new systems.
45
Аnna D. Kuzmina
Department of Innovation Management
Saint-Petersburg Electrotechnical University”LETI”
St. Petersburg, Russia
gooseberry1@yandex.ru
II. TRENDS OF IV INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
A. Signs of the industry 4.0
The first industrial revolution began in the second half of
the 18th century after the appearance of steam engines, which
allowed the transition from manual labor to machinery.
The second occurred with the development of electricity
and was characterized by the development of mass conveyor
production.
The third industrial revolution, also called digital, began in
the second half of the 20th century with the creation of digital
computers and the subsequent evolution of information
technology. Our world lives in this era. The digital revolution
at this time goes into the fourth, the peculiarities of which are
the massive introduction of cyber physical systems into
production.
As the industrial revolution describes 4.0 the founder of
the WEF Klaus Schwab, it blurs the boundaries between the
physical, digital and biological spheres. By the way, he wrote
a whole book about this, which is called, the Fourth Industrial
Revolution [3], [4]. The first steps of the world to a new
industrial revolution were cloud technologies, the
development of methods for collecting and analyzing Big
Data, crowdsourcing, biotechnology, unmanned vehicles and
medicine based on 3D printing. In the world of finance, this is
the Bitcoin crypto currency and the Blockchain technology.
The Big Data concept is a set of technologies that are
designed to perform such operations:
• handle large amounts of data compared to "standard"
scenarios
• be able to work with fast incoming data in very large
volumes
• be able to work with structured and poorly structured
data in parallel in different aspects.
An example of Big Data can be the Large Hadron Collider,
which produces a huge amount of data and does it all the time.
The installation continuously produces large amounts of data,
and scientists with their help solve a number of problems in
parallel [5].
978-1-5386-5612-9/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
 Internet of Things is a concept of space in which
everything from the analog and digital worlds can be
combined.
It's not just a lot of different devices and sensors,
connected together by wire and wireless communication
channels and connected to the Internet, and this is a closer
integration of the real and virtual worlds, in which
communication is produced between people and devices.
Virtual reality (virtual reality) - a world created by technical
means, transmitted to a person through his senses: sight,
hearing, smell, touch and others. Virtual reality simulates both
impact and response to impact [6].
Augmented reality implies the ability to add virtual
properties to physical objects, for example, displaying
information about them, which, moreover, can be
individualized for a specific subject of perception.
Printing on a 3D printer can be done in different ways and
using different materials, but at the heart of any of them lies
the principle of layer wise creation (growing) of a solid object.
This is a universal method for creating a large range of
physical objects based on a single platform. It makes it
possible to abandon heterogeneous approaches to solving
various problems in favor of a single approach implemented in
digital form.
There is also experimental bio printers in which the
printing of the 3D structure of the future object (organ for
transplantation) is made by drops containing living cells [7],
[8].
B. Consequences and Risks of Industrial Revolution
A) For the economy
The branches of the economy that have access to large data
sets will have the opportunity to radically improve the quality
of decisions made on their basis, especially routine ones.
This applies to banking, legal services, insurance,
accounting, management, consulting and audit, metrological
support, health care [9].
There are four main effects:
• growth in customer expectations
• improving the quality of products
• joint innovations and new forms of organization.
The advantage will be for companies owning a unique
platform that unites many people.
B) For people
Although a person is freed from heavy and routine work,
but the complete independence of production from people will
lead to a mass loss of jobs, which can now be seen in countries
where automation is practiced in factories and factories.
The development of technology can also cause an increase
in the gap between income from capital and labor and, as a
result, the growth of inequality. The demand for workers with
46
lower education and lower qualifications, on the contrary, will
decrease [10].
Therefore, experts urge states to worry now about this
issue and prepare for a new industrial revolution.
Countries with low-wage labor may lose their advantage
over the developed countries and lag behind them even more.
C) For a person
A new world based on digital technologies will change the
person's personality, as Industry 4.0 will lay new principles in
ethics and aesthetics. A person can adjust the goods and
servants, and create a "pro-indebtedness" for the world, which
he likes specifically.
As the person immerses in the digital environment, his
individual behavior will become more digitized and provoke
alienation from the person of his inner world, the lack of
freedom to form his own personality, the segregation of
people based on their identity, and, as a consequence, the
polarization of human co-societies .
D) For the state
The more tightly the physical world intersects with the
digital one, the more opportunities will be available to monitor
and monitor undesirable events around the world via digital
networks.
New technologies will enable citizens to influence the
political life of their state, but Industry 4.0 will exacerbate
security problems, and wars in the future will have a
completely different nature.
According to many researchers [11], future conflicts will
have a hybrid character and combine direct actions on the
battlefield with non-state phenomena and elements.
The boundary between war and peace, soldier and civil
and even violence and non-violence (cyberterrorism) is
frighteningly blurred. With the development of military
technologies, the emergence of biological and autonomous
weapons, non-state associations of people will achieve the
same level of lethalness as the state.
In addition, the deteriorating position of the middle class
can lead to the dilution of political systems based on the
middle class, the strengthening of the ideas of populism,
radicalism, fundamentalism and militarism, which we can now
observe.
This, in turn, can lead to increased global uncertainty.
III. DEVELOPMENT OF COMPETENCIES IN THE ERA OF THE
IV INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
A. World experience
The uniqueness of the fourth industrial revolution, in
addition to the systemic, developmental, and all-embracing
dimensions, lies in the growing harmonization and integration
of a large number of different scientific disciplines and
discoveries (Figure 1).
 The growing pace of technological change and
globalization provided new opportunities, and also highlighted
the importance of aligning the working methods of companies,
government policies, education and training systems with
today's skill needs, and also the awareness of the need to
outline a basic joint action plan that brings together the
authorities, business and the sphere of education. And
although the education systems remain deeply dependent on
concrete realities, a common vision of the basic principles and
basic characteristics that will best cope with the difficulties
and maximize the possibilities of the Fourth Industrial
Revolution appears.
Fig. 1 The influence of the IV Industrial Revolution on the development
of competences
Source: Kondakov A. "The School of the Age of the
Fourth Industrial Revolution" \ Mobile Electron Education,
2017 [11].
The problem of the need to change the system of training
the highest qualification for an increasingly active
technological order began to manifest itself relatively recently.
It must be admitted that most foreign universities in the
industrialized countries have long passed the practical
implementation of such models as "Learning Through Life"
(Learning by Doing), models of variation learning and some
others.
However, experience has shown that the existing
educational system does not keep pace with the changing
needs of rapidly developing industrial production on the basis
of the emerging new technological order. This situation led to
a conceptual interpretation of approaches to the modernization
of the training system, including higher qualifications.
Some foreign authors acknowledge that the process of
creating a training system for the fourth industrial revolution,
which was given the name of Industry 4.0 in the German
interpretation, is at the very beginning of a long journey. This
is due to the lack of the necessary amount of empirical data on
the basis of which it would be possible to construct
conceptually other models of the complex interaction of the
Human-Machine-Information System and, accordingly, to
determine what requirements will be imposed on a person's
qualifications in this system and how this qualification can be
47
obtained. An unequivocal challenge is the identification by
employers of a gap between the expected and real
competencies of employees, as well as the dissatisfaction of
workers with the knowledge and skills acquired and required
in the production. According to the OECD report "Getting
Skills Right: Assessing and Anticipating Changing Skill
Needs" for 2015, a group of countries in which both
employees and employers identify this gap as large includes
such countries with a high level of innovation and industrial
development, such as Japan, South Korea, the USA and
Germany [12].
B. The experience of South Korean companies
When formulating the educational paradigm of a new
industrial revolution, we proceed from the assumption that this
paradigm should not conflict with the pa-radium of industrial
production. The presence of such a conflict, for example, in
the situation of training in conditions of a rigid educational
environment and further work that requires maximum
flexibility, significantly reduces the effectiveness of training
[13], [14].
If we follow the principle of the conformity of the
production and educational paradigm, then the need for
systemic changes in the educational environment naturally
follows. Such changes are already being implemented in South
Korean universities and they can be classified as follows:
• digitalization of education. In essence, this means the
expansion, with the help of digital solutions and information
systems, of students' access to the educational resources of the
best universities in the world, to remote data from the results
of scientific experiments and research, to the library of
engineering tasks and problems, and to the creation of
distributed labor, research and educational teams;
• personalization of training, which means the deepening
and development of existing practice of the possibility of
constructing an individual educational trajectory with the
possibility of returning to branch points and acquiring
additional skills throughout life. Another aspect of
personalization is the consideration of the requirements and
requests of not only students, but also direct employers;
• The project approach is an integral component of in-
depth education, which allows to significantly increasing the
effectiveness of the educational process - from the first stage
of understanding and identification of problems to the final
stage of practical work. The project approach is inseparably
linked with the adaptive education, the main component of
which is training through practical activities in the subjects of
the market, industry and science;
• Integration of formal and non-formal education, which in
fact means blurring the physical boundaries of the university
and shifting the emphasis from the process of gaining
knowledge to its recognition and evaluation, regardless of the
actual place of obtaining knowledge and skills;
• Creation of creative spaces that actually act as integration
areas for students of various specialties, real business sector
and industry, academic and professional education. A
prerequisite for the work of such sites is joint work on projects
initiated by the real sector of the economy;
• creation of university hubs - in contrast to the
prerequisite networking of universities means the creation of
real sites in the form of scientific and educational centers
created with the participation and under the auspices of
various universities [15].
CONCLUSION
The rapid development of the fourth industrial revolution
in the world exacerbates Russia's challenge - both to the
economically independent state as a whole and to the Russian
educational system in particular. The strategy of catching-up
development should be replaced by a strategy of advanced
development in certain spheres and sectors.
A similar task is also in the sphere of higher education,
where Russian educational institutions have both considerable
experience and potential, but the lag in the part of modern
teaching technologies makes it necessary to change the
educational paradigm, which by its internal content should
coincide-dating with a changing paradigm of industrial
production [16].
The world educational system is currently subject to
structural changes, which consist in the active introduction of
electronic means and additional forms of education.
Distributed knowledge is becoming more accessible in almost
all corners of the world, with the help of actively developing
educational platforms.
Gradually, the boundaries between professional and
academic education, formal and informal education are
blurred, personalization of education is intensifying, which in
turn strengthens the role of the university as an integrator of
scientific, educational, business and industrial environments,
as well as the role of teachers as knowledge managers. In this
context, the role of certification of individual competences can
be significantly strengthened, from which the final degree is
subsequently formed.
48
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