Silvia Fareri

Silvia Fareri, Riccardo Apreda, Valentina Mulas et al.

In recent years, the manufacturing sector has been responsible for nearly 55 percent of total energy consumption, inducing a major impact on the global ecosystem. Although stricter regulations, restrictions on heavy manufacturing and technological advances are increasing its sustainability, zero-emission and fuel-efficient manufacturing is still considered a utopian target. In parallel,companies that have invested in digital innovation now need to align their internal competencies to maximize their return on investment. Moreover, a primary feature of Industry 4.0 is the digitization of production processes, which offers the opportunity to optimize energy consumption. However, given the speed with which innovation manifests itself, tools capable of measuring the impact that technology is having on digital and green professions and skills are still being designed. In light of the above, in this article we present the Worker Profiler, a software designed to map the skills currently possessed by workers, identifying misalignment with those they should ideally possess to meet the renewed demands that digital innovation and environmental preservation impose. The creation of the Worker Profiler consists of two steps: first, the authors inferred the key technologies and skills for the area of interest, isolating those with markedly increasing patent trends and identifying green and digital enabling skills and occupations. Thus, the software was designed and implemented at the user-interface level. The output of the self-assessment is the definition of the missing digital and green skills and the job roles closest to the starting one in terms of current skills; both the results enable the definition of a customized retraining strategy. The tool has shown evidence of being user-friendly, effective in identifying skills gaps and easily adaptable to other contexts.

Silvia Fareri, Nicola Melluso, Filippo Chiarello et al.

In today's digital world, there is an increasing focus on soft skills. On the one hand, they facilitate innovation at companies, but on the other, they are unlikely to be automated soon. Researchers struggle with accurately approaching quantitatively the study of soft skills due to the lack of data-driven methods to retrieve them. This limits the possibility for psychologists and HR managers to understand the relation between humans and digitalisation. This paper presents SkillNER, a novel data-driven method for automatically extracting soft skills from text. It is a named entity recognition (NER) system trained with a support vector machine (SVM) on a corpus of more than 5000 scientific papers. We developed this system by measuring the performance of our approach against different training models and validating the results together with a team of psychologists. Finally, SkillNER was tested in a real-world case study using the job descriptions of ESCO (European Skill/Competence Qualification and Occupation) as textual source. The system enabled the detection of communities of job profiles based on their shared soft skills and communities of soft skills based on their shared job profiles. This case study demonstrates that the tool can automatically retrieve soft skills from a large corpus in an efficient way, proving useful for firms, institutions, and workers. The tool is open and available online to foster quantitative methods for the study of soft skills.