Monetary value of skills

 

The Value of Skills in the Age of Industry 4.0

Against the background of demographic change many companies are already confronted with a shortage of skilled manpower. This shortage will become even more urgent in the coming years. Giving credit to forecasts, it seems almost certain, that not only there will be a strong decline in the availability of young employees, but also the majority of the current employees will reach retirement age and therefore resign working life within the next years.

A steadily increasing shortage of skilled manpower can lead to future problems in the economic performance of many companies. As a result companies need monetary based evaluation methods to analyze their current organizational competence portfolio as well as the individual competencies of their aging employees in order to make these transparent for an efficient coordination of their resources.

The project investigates which competencies will be required by mechatronics technicians in the future in order to master the new technological challenges of networking, automation and the digitization of production systems and the associated complexities. Employing the budget-based willingness-to-pay approach, the study is based on interviewing more than 150 personnel and production managers.