Jon Excell

Skills body Semta relaunches as Enginuity

News

As part of an effort to help engineering employers meet their rapidly evolving skills requirements employer-led skills body Semta has this week (6th February) been relaunched as Enginuity.

The new organisation will continue the work of Semta – but with a renewed focus on helping employers meet the challenges of digitalisation by attracting new talent, and upskilling existing workers.

In an interview with The Engineer, Enginuity CEO Ann Watson said that the relaunch was a response to the manufacturing sector’s increasing demand for new skills. “Skills have been top of the priority list for a number of years,” she said,  “and as we move into the world of Industry 4.0 those skills challenges are changing. The need for data and digital skills is increasing and we’re seeing a huge upskilling challenge. Sixty per cent of the manufacturing workforce of 2030 have already left school, and these are the individuals that we’ve got to upskill.”

Enginuity will help address this, she said, by using its own data science capability to assists employers in a number of different ways: from predicting future skills requirements, to developing apprenticeship standards, and helping companies upskill existing employees. “We looked at how can we use the tools and techniques of industry 4.0 to create something quite special in the skills world,” she said. Better data will only improve [these solutions] moving forward,” said Watson.  “Making these solutions even more responsive to current and future needs, an even better user experience, and even easier to integrate and measure.”

Semta (The Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies Alliance), was a not-for-profit organisation responsible for engineering skills for the future of the UK's most advanced sectors. Led by employers, its job was to transform the skills and productivity of the people who power our engineering and advanced manufacturing technologies sectors, enabling UK industry to compete on the global stage.

The practical skills solutions already offered by the Semta Group and EAL (the Semta Group’s specialist skills partner and awarding organisation for industry) will continue as part of the new organisation.