Smart production technologies, high-performance software and progressive communication processes. How do production workers in the Dutch 'Smart industry' stay up to date with rapid technological developments? What do they need to stay healthy, happy and productive in their work? Professor Beate van der Heijden and associate professor Jeroen de Jong on their participation in the unique eight-year NWA-ORC consortium project Smart Skills@Scale funded by NWO. ‘Production work in smart technology is not a matter of routine. It is a matter of craftsmanship.’
With nearly 50 education partners and research groups, the Smart Skills@Scale project aims to connect SMEs, social partners, communities, education and research to achieve a breakthrough in sustainable work in the Smart industry. The National Science Agenda (NWA) awarded a 9.3 million euro grant last summer to work nationwide on challenges in technology, craftsmanship, sustainable careers, workplace learning and corporate knowledge sharing. Researchers in Strategic Human Resource Management Van der Heijden and De Jong are part of the Smart Jobs & Careers research group. Their assignment is: How can we redesign jobs in the Smart industry so that employees have the space to learn and develop more actively?
Panel study and career crafting
De Jong: ‘We are first going to put a kind of thermometer into the profession, following a group of about 1,000 production workers every year for the next eight years. How are they doing in terms of learning ability, knowledge, well-being and happiness? Using a panel study, we will see whether improvements can be seen because of the project in the extent to which employees can handle new technology.’ Van der Heijden: ‘To do so, we use existing 'career literature', such as that on the 'career actor' and the theorization around sustainable careers and integrate it with other social science frameworks. Thus, we look at the production worker as the owner of his or her career, and at his relationship with parties in the context: of the manager, immediate colleagues, and the home front, but also with the institutional context, such as retirement age, in this case in the Netherlands.’
Besides a panel study, Van der Heijden and De Jong want to develop a 'career crafting intervention', which focuses on monitoring and promoting or restoring a proper match between work tasks on the one hand and employee strengths, interests, and capabilities on the other. Van der Heijden: ‘We want to monitor career dynamics in both the short and long term. Whereas most scientific studies have a shorter duration, in this eight-year project we can start to discover more fluctuations and causal links when it comes to happiness, health, and productivity. And that does make this project unique.’
Most scientific research focuses on higher-skilled employees. If research focuses at all on workers in the workplace, it is usually about back pain or working conditions, rarely about their careers.
