Challenge 3:
The skills shortage

Nearly all engineering leaders (90%), worried that poor access to skills would impede their ability to meet sustainability goals. Companies are allocating substantial portions of their engineering and new product development budgets to making products more sustainable (see Chart 4), but this will mean little if they cannot access the skills to deliver this change.

Chart 4:

First, sustainable product design, the design and engineering skills needed to create sustainable physical products. This is an emerging area that covers selecting and combining sustainable materials, and (re)designing products for durability, repairability, modularity and recoverability. 73% of organizations have seen higher revenue from sustainable product design initiatives, and 71% have seen faster progress toward their sustainability goals[16]. Such skills will need to increase across the board, but some areas face particular challenges: for example, Europe faces a shortage of 100,000 battery experts by 2030 if investment in training does not increase[17].

Second, digital engineering skills to make physical products faster and more efficient. That will need skills in digital product design, model-based systems engineering, product lifecycle management, and of course AI, both the generative and ‘traditional’ sort. All of these technologies will also rely on skills in data collection, management, and analysis to create digital continuity across and between product lines.

Battery Passport: Where regulation calls for new talent strategies
The European Union Batteries Regulation requires batteries to be tracked through their lifetime, with detailed data captured on design, materials, usage, and end-of-life handling at each stage of the battery’s life. This approach to lifetime management is likely to become the norm for many advanced products. It represents a significant new area of skills requirements, combining skills in battery chemistry and production with digital continuity skills in data management and PLM platforms.

We can break skills needs into two categories

Accessing the right skills:
The solutions being explored

These skills will be needed for the long term, and so require a long-term strategy to find and nurture them.

Develop scalable training programs to meet new needs: This starts with mapping your long term plans to the skills you need. In new areas, like setting up gigafactories or launching a software division, you may need outside help to define skills requirements. Once you have done so, libraries of digital training modules aligned to standardized learning journeys can be developed and delivered at scale, to help engineers learn new technologies and processes.

The Capgemini Battery Academy enables gigafactories to recruit, hire, onboard, train and certify employees. Through a mix of consultancy, platforms and technologies, we help gigafactories map their required workforce and develop ‘skills personas’, for which tailored training can be developed. The Academy’s digital learning platform delivers this digitized training at scale – including via ‘hands on’ VR and AR training. This approach provides risk-free learning, so the workforce is ready from day one. The benefits scale rapidly, since digital training can be easily rolled out to subsequent facilities as they are built.

Partner to access global skills: Even with training programs, there may not be enough people to recruit and train near your facilities, or at least not at the right price point. Companies are addressing this by partnering to access skills around the world.
In our survey, 56% of engineering leaders were setting up operations near global hotspots of high-skilled talent. This can be tricky for those without a local presence in such places, so it’s no surprise that 92% worked with engineering service providers with a presence in these global hotspots to set up and manage their outsourced operations.

In recent years, Stellantis has worked with partners to launch a
Data and Software Academy to upskill and reskill over 1,000 Stellantis employees per year in software professions, and an Electrification Academy delivering e-learning programs that
trained over 56,000 employees in 2022.