A Guide for the Food Industry to Meet the Future Skills Requirements Emerging with Industry 4.0.

The food industry has recently faced rapid and constant changes due to the current industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, which has also profoundly altered the dynamics of the industry overall. Due to the emerging digitalisation, manufacturing models are changing through the use of smart technologies, such as robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, etc. They are experiencing a new phase of automation that enables innovative and more efficient processes, products and services. The introduction of these novel business models demands new professional skills requirements in the workforce of the food industry. In this work, we introduce an industry-driven proactive strategy to achieve a successful digital transformation in the food sector. For that purpose, we focus on defining the current and near-future key skills and competencies demanded by each of the professional profiles related to the food industry. To achieve this, we generated an automated database of current and future professions and competencies and skills. This database can be used as a fundamental roadmap guiding the sector through future changes caused by Industry 4.0. The interest shown by the local sectorial cluster and related entities reinforce the idea. This research will be a key tool for both academics and policy-makers to provide well-developed and better-oriented continuous training programs in order to reduce the skill mismatch between the workforce and the jobs.


Introduction
The term "food industry" encompasses any company that produces, processes, manufactures, sells and serves food, beverage and dietary supplements [1]. It refers to all stages of the process, including design, construction, maintenance and delivery of solutions to the customer in the industry of animal nutrition and the food industry (food and drink) [2].
In recent times, the food industry has gone through rapid and constant changes caused by the recent industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. The term "Industry 4.0" has been used to refer to the innovative production processes which are partly or completely automated via technology, and devices communicating autonomously with each other along the value chain activities [3]. Thus, it is basically based on intelligent networking of machines, electrical equipment and novel Information Technology (IT) systems enabling processes optimisation and increased productivity of value creation chains [4,5]. The digital transformation is the key element of the ongoing industrial revolution [4,6]. Here, basic data processing) [14]. Higher cognitive skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, teamwork, problem-solving, decision-making, lifelong learning, and so on will become very crucial [12,14].
Furthermore, skills such as managing complexity, complex information processing and abstraction for obtaining a simplified representation of the bigger picture will be demanded from the near future workforce [15]. Skills such as decision making, critical thinking and independent problem solving will be considered crucial especially in reviewed technical profiles, such as production operators and control technicians [12]. Moreover, the demand for managerial, communication and organisational skills will increase significantly [12,15].
The required physical and manual skills for the job profiles will be redefined depending on the range of automated work activities. In general, the demand for physical and manual skills will also drop, but it will still remain the largest category of workforce skills in the near future [14].
Green skills are considered key to maintain the competitive edge of the European manufacturing industry as a result of the increased focus on environmental awareness and sustainability. Therefore, in the near future in Europe, the workforce (including the food industry) will be expected to master green skills.
Overall, as a result of Industry 4.0, the near-future workforce is expected to have more accentuated social, emotional, higher cognitive and technological skills, than basic cognitive, physical and manual skills [14]. The general trend points to a greater need for technological knowledge and less administrative and technical knowledge.
In conclusion, the food industry demands new professional skills from its workforce. Therefore, there is a high demand for a continuous update of the qualifications, skills and knowledge of its workforce in order to create a highly qualified, multi-skilled labor force that can handle all the technological progress [17,18]. Through this updating process, the food industry workforce of today and tomorrow, will be able to adapt to digital transformations, changes in production processes and newly introduced working practices and patterns of which are mostly connected with computer sciences [19,20]. Addressing the current skill needs and foreseeing the future skill requirements of the sector is the first step of the continuous skills update of its workforce. In this work, we have achieved this through the generation of a sectorial database. After that, a strategy should be developed for reducing the skills gaps between the jobs and the workforce. It should involve not only attracting and developing the new talents needed, but also re-skilling current employees through well-organised training and education programs, as well as re-designing work processes [3].
The food industry has been lacking a specific roadmap that guides the sector through the industrial revolution 4.0. The sector urgently needs a strategy for establishing and meeting current and future skills requirements. Therefore, the food industry needs to develop tools for implementing new skills and competences, for which reviewing the approaches already taken by the other sectors (construction, steel, automotive, etc.) would be very beneficial. Additionally, the sector needs to identify directives for education policy-makers, so that related degrees, subject syllabuses, and continuous training programs become aligned with these skills needs. Our work is developed in order to fill this gap. In this work, we firstly introduced a strategy adapted from several European sectorial projects to meet the future skills requirements and create a highly qualified and competent workforce. After, we focused on identifying the current and near-future key skills and competencies demanded by the professional profiles (engineers, operators and managers) of the food industry. We used ESCO's (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations) research as the main source for identifying the current food sector-related job profiles and needed skills for each profile. Then we generated an automated database for the current skills of these profiles using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the excel format. During the development of the future skills and competences, we analysed all the job profiles present at the database one by one and we selected the ones which will be transformed by digital technological developments. We benefited from respectable European references through collecting data from the European ICT Professional Role Profiles framework and several strategic sectorial and inter-sectorial European projects. After identifying the additional skills that will be needed for each profile in the near future, we added them to our database and completed the update for the near-future skills requirements for the job profiles. Ultimately, we generated an automated database for current and future skills requirements for each professional profile, which can be used as a fundamental framework by the food sector through all the midterm-future changes caused by Industry 4.0. Therefore, the target end-users of the developed database are the companies of the food sector, the training centers and universities that are responsible for designing and delivering convenient training programs to provide the aforementioned skills needs.
We believe that our work will be a key tool providing guidelines to the food industry to build a workforce meeting the future skills requirements and guiding the sector leaders as well as the academia to offer better oriented and well-developed continuous training programs.

Materials and Methods
In this chapter, first of all, we present a strategy for the food industry to meet the current and future skills requirements in order to overcome the challenges coming with Industry 4.0, make good use of digitalisation and keep up with the latest technological innovations.
The activities encompassed by this long-term skills strategy should focus on making the workforce pro-active to the implementation of new technologies that help to optimize food manufacturing and increase efficiency. In order to reduce the time required for the full digital transformation process, these activities should constantly supervise the implementation of industrial skills in training programs and develop the required tools for that implementation [20][21][22].
The industry-driven proactive strategy should involve the next steps in order to achieve a successful digital transformation in the industry: 1.
The first step is evaluating the current state of the digital transformation of the food industry [20], and analysing the key trends about the upcoming technological developments [21]. After identifying the main technological developments and the related required skills and competencies, a future scenario can be developed. Economic development related to digital transformations should be also considered [11,20]. The manufacturing processes and workforce that are affected by the digital transformation will be determined.

2.
This step involves identifying the skills and professional job profiles that will be needed in the future and determining the skills gaps that are created by the current and the foreseen technological developments [20,21]. The most crucial part of this step is to identify the skills demands of the industry in proactive ways, taking skills gaps and shortages into account [20]. An automated database of the sector-related job profiles defining the needed skills and competencies will be generated. It will enable an internationally common ground and mutual recognition for the needed skills and jobs in the food industry.

3.
As the next step, the training and curricula requirements will be determined considering the skills gaps, and then, the training programs will be created for the selected skills and job profiles [21]. New methods should be discovered to implement education content in a rapid and effective way, not only in the companies but also in the formal education and training institutions. Training programs should be upgraded and updated continuously to reach a higher quality [20]. Talent management and recruitment processes should be also included in the training process [20].

4.
Better matching between skill requirements of the food industry and skills provided by training centers will be assured [21]. New standards will be developed for the sector skills recognition [20].

5.
The next step will be finding out new methods to attract more talented people to the food industry and improve the opportunities for a more diverse talent pool, and overcome recruitment challenges [20-22]. 6.
The final step is called monitoring. All the adjustments coming with the strategy will be monitored continuously to adopt upcoming new developments [9].
This work involves the first two steps of the strategy.
During the execution of our work, to develop the database presented herein, we used the ESCO database and the European ICT Professional Role Profiles framework (generated by the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS) and European Committee for Standardization (CEN)) as the main data sources. We also took several strategic sectorial and inter-sectorial European projects as a reference, in some of which we directly took part or acted as collaborators: ESSA (steel sector) [20], DRIVES (automotive sector) [21], APPRENTICESHIPQ (Procedures for Quality Apprenticeships in Educational Organisations) [22] and SMeART ((Digitalization of Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs) [23]. Therefore, it is compulsory to give definitions of the references in order to clarify our study. ESCO is the European multilingual classification of Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations. In other words, it is a dictionary that describes, identifies and classifies professional occupations, skills, and qualifications relevant for the labor market, education and training [24]. It is directly linked to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) which is a classification of occupation groups managed by the International Labor Organization (ILO), since the information and data in ESCO are based on an original work published by the ILO under the title "International Standard Classification of Occupations", ISCO-08. CEPIS is a non-profit organisation seeking to improve and promote a high standard among informatics professionals in recognition of the impact that informatics has on employment, business and society [25]. CEN is an association that brings together the National Standardisation Bodies of 34 European countries supporting standardisation activities in relation to a wide range of fields and sectors [26]. The European ICT Professional Role Profiles framework was generated with the help of these two organisations in order to contribute to a shared European reference language for developing, planning and managing ICT professional needs in a long-term perspective and to maturing the ICT profession overall [27].
Additionally, during the generation of the automated database for the job profiles, VBA was used as the programming language in Microsoft Word Excel file.

Results and Discussion
Our aim was to generate an automated database for skill requirements (current and near-future) for all the professional profiles related to the food sector.
We based our work on ESCO's research using it as the main source for identifying the current sector-related job profiles and needed skills for each profile. First, we selected the professional profiles related to the food industry in the ESCO database which is in word excel format. Once all the sector-related job profiles were extracted and integrated into a new excel file, the automation process was carried out using VBA and an automated database was generated in the excel format. This database included only the current skills needs of the job profiles.
During the development of the future skills and competences, we collected data from the European ICT Professional Role Profiles framework and benefited from several strategic sectorial and inter-sectorial European projects. In order to incorporate the near-future skills requirements of the job profiles into the database, we studied all the job profiles one by one and selected the ones which will be transformed by the digital technological developments. During this process, we used the aforementioned European projects as a guide to analyse what kind of job profiles related to these sectors (steel, automotive, smart engineering etc.) have undergone modification through digital transformation. We observed that job profiles that have common roles in all of the industrial areas (food, steel, automotive, etc.), such as project manager, production manager etc. will need the same kind of modifications in their skills requirements in the future. For that purpose, we identified job profiles in the food industry with equivalent roles in other sectors that have already undergone changes, and we selected their future skills requirements. Later, we also identified future skills needs for profiles that are specific to the food industry through a detailed analysis. Then, we added the new skills and competencies to our database and updated the needed skills for the altered job profiles. Furthermore, the European ICT Professional Role Profiles framework provided us the specific job profiles of which skills have undergone changes through Industry 4.0 as well as the additional skills that will be required by these profiles in the near future. We added the mentioned future skills of the professional profiles that were already present in our database and completed the update for the near-future skills requirements for the job profiles. Figure 1 demonstrates an example tab of the generated database for the food industry. In this specific case, the 'food grader' professional profile is used as an example. The first four rows of the table show a hierarchical order of the occupational groups; in this case, the job profile 'food grader' belongs to the 'Food and beverage tasters and graders' group, which is a part of the bigger occupation group 'Food processing and related trades workers', and so on. The database also provides a weblink to ESCO's webpage where we can find all the introduced data related to the job profile. In the table, we can also see alternative names used for the same job profile in food sector and the ISCO number of the profile, which can be interpreted as an international code of the occupation for the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO). Additionally, the table shows the essential and optional knowledge and skills currently needed for the job profile, as well as the future skills that we introduced after a detailed analysis.
The skills that are currently demanded by the food sector and extracted from the ESCO database are in black, while the future skills (essential and optional) that are generated with the help of ICT Professional Role Profiles framework European Union sectoral projects and several other sources are in red. The complete version of the table (Figure 1) is provided in Figure S1 in Supplementary Materials.
Since this is an automated database, we can call it a smart table. For example, in the excel table of Figure 1, when a job profile is introduced in the cell related to the professional job profile (changing 'food grader' to another profile), all the data related to the new profile appears automatically in the table, replacing the information related to the 'food grader' profile. The automation of the database allows us to reach the current and future skill needs of any professional profile immediately. This makes the database a very functional tool during the development of the training programs. Tables 1-3 present a brief view of the last version of the automated database: the professional job profiles related to the food industry, their definition, ISCO numbers and the key skills demanded by these job profiles. All the data here is provided by ESCO. Table 4 demonstrates our contribution to the database: future skills requirements demanded by the mentioned job profiles. These newly introduced skills are mainly transversal and technological ones generated by Industry 4.0 and they are highlighted in the red colour since they represent our addition to the database. We used 7 job profiles as an example. The complete version of the documents, Tables 1-3, can be found in the Supplementary Materials as Figures S2-S4 respectively.

Craft and related trades workers
Food processing, wood working, garment and other craft and related trades workers Food processing and related trades workers Food and beverage tasters and graders Professional Job profile: food grader ESCO link: http://data.europa.eu/esco/occupation/b4306d87-7992-47fc-914a-4485a4e7003c Alternative labels: food product grader Description: Food graders inspect, sort and grade food products. They grade food products according to sensory criteria or with the help of machinery. They determine the product's use by grading them into the appropriate classes and discarding damaged or expired foods. Food graders measure and weigh the products and report their findings so the food can be further processed. ISCO number: 7515 Essential knowledge food preservation food product ingredients food safety standards risks associated to physical, chemical, biological hazards in food and beverages skill/competence apply requirements concerning manufacturing of food and beverages assess nutritional characteristics of food keep up-to-date with regulations perform food risk analysis perform food safety checks perform sensory evaluation prepare visual data skill/competence -Optional knowledge skill/competence advise on food preservation analyse samples of food and beverages apply scientific methods develop standard operating procedures in the food chain Future skills Essential data analysis and mathematical skills quantitive and statistical skills basic digital skills cybersecurity inspecting and monitoring skills use of digital communication tools critical thinking and decision making adaptability and continuous learning complex information processing and interpretation IoT technology collaborative/autonomous robots big data cloud computing sensors technology machine learning traceability Optional adaptability and continious learning teaching and training the others active listening process analysis

Conclusions
Having a qualified workforce that can handle the growing technology is the major key condition for the food industry to overcome the big industrial revolution challenge. It can only be achieved through addressing the current skill needs and foreseeing future skill requirements of the sector and providing the most convenient training and education programs to reduce the skills gaps between the workforce and the industry needs.
In this work, firstly, we introduced an industry-driven proactive strategy adapted from several European sectorial projects to achieve a successful digital transformation for the food industry. It can serve the sector as a guideline to meet future skills requirements.
Our work aimed to address the near-future changes in the professional skill requirements of the food industry facing Industry 4.0. In this framework, each job profile related to the food industry in the ESCO database was analysed, whether they will undergo a change due to digitalisation or not. Then, based on the obtained answer, the skills requirements of each profile are updated depending on the range of automation of their work activities. Moreover, we identified the qualifications demanded by each professional job profile benefiting from highly acceptable European sources.
We generated an automated database for skills requirements (current and near-future) for the professional profiles related to the food industry, which can be used as a fundamental framework by the sector through all the midterm-future changes caused by Industry 4.0. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the obtained results have raised the interest of the Basque Food Cluster.
For all these reasons, we believe that our work can be a sectorial and academic guideline to prepare convenient and well-developed training programs to deliver the needed skills. Applying the successful training programs created through the food industry-academia collaboration, the gap between what is expected by the industry and what is delivered by the workforce will be bridged. The food industry will win over the new talents who gain the required specific qualifications and full expertise of the sector through these specific training programs. The training of current employees in the sector will cause the food industry to keep up with the industrial changes and global competitiveness. Therefore, the workforce with updated qualifications will increase the production efficiency of the sector.
The food industry is always searching for new projects and lines of investigation, with a special focus on those concerning the sector's digitalisation. A major part of these researches would be ideally wider versions of our work; they would include training and educational programs created to deliver the demanded industrial skill requirements which were addressed by our research. Therefore, we believe that our work can be used as a roadmap for the next generation of projects in this area.
Supplementary Materials: The following are available online at http://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/9/4/492/s1, Figure S1: an example tab of the automated database generated for the job profiles in the food industry, Figure S2: a brief view of the automated database (in excel format) including the description, alternative names and ISCO numbers of the professional profiles related to the food industry, Figure S3: a brief view of the automated database (in excel format) including essential skills, knowledge and competences needed by the professional profiles related to the food industry., Figure S4: a brief view of the automated database (in excel format) including optional skills, knowledge and competences needed by the professional profiles related to the food industry.
Author Contributions: T.A. and A.G., writing, conceptualisation, methodology and investigation; A.O. and F.B., methodology and E.A., conceptualisation and investigation. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This research was co-funded by Fundación BBK-BBK fundazioa, partner of the Deusto Digital Industry Chair.

Conflicts of Interest:
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.