Demand for digital skills in the engineering and contracting sector is ever increasing. Our traditional employee mix was 60% engineering and 40% commercial. Today we employ 80% digital analytics/technology and 20% with robust business acumen. When RMIT University asked Cast Solutions to share our emerging needs in the digital space, we were delighted to accept.
The Industry Roundtable topic was “Digital work practices: where are the jobs, what are the jobs and how prepared are graduates”. The project lead, A/Professor Fiona Peterson was inspirational. She sought to extract the diverse thoughts of industry participants to help challenge the research project. The purpose of the discussion was to invite industry thoughts to challenge findings from a research project. The research was seeking to develop digital capabilities/descriptors for teachers to apply to curriculum.
The challenge is in translating emerging business requirements into course specific solutions. We discussed the functional skills sets as well as the cultural capabilities we are seeking from graduates. Cast Solutions has invested significantly in interns, cadets and graduates. Over the past 18months, Cast has directly placed over 50 STEM | data literate interns into client organisations. We have also taken on 10 ourselves. We mentor, live and learn the capabilities (skills) with our own employees, as we implement data analytics solutions.
Just as importantly, we seek to learn from the young people who join our business, listen to their ideas, solutions and thought processes. It is the combination of all of these things, that will be instrumental in helping future graduates develop digital capabilities for today and the future. For this journey is dynamic, exciting and evolving. Watch this space….