Resumo

The context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution affected the organizational field, by defining new relationships between I4.0 technology and the use of human capital. I4.0 challenges impose the development of new skills, either technical, methodological, social, or personal, to meet the demands of production sectors. The development of these skills involves different stakeholders, such as governments, companies, universities, and society in general (Schwab, 2017).

The study of of structures, maturity models, and scripts for the digital transformation of manufacturing companies in the automotive sector, for developing their capacities for Industry 4.0 presents opportunity for investigation (Mittal, Romero, & Wuest, 2018). In addition, studies on Industry 4.0 show the need to know the evolution of work profiles, which create new demands, as in that sector, and how to deal with this gap in employees’ skills (AnTosz, 2018). The main objective of this study is to investigate what human skills contribute to technological maturity in Industry 4.0.

The human factor is of major relevance for the evolution of the technological maturity levels of Industry 4.0 (Herzog & Bender, 2017). Due to its technological complexity, it is timely for companies to identify the technical and behavioral skills of employees who will operate in this new technological and social reality. It is also necessary to develop such skills for the qualification of professionals already hired (Rosé, 2018).

This study, predominantly descriptive and with exploratory nuances (Creswell, 2010), followed the nine research phases indicated by Sampieri, Collado, and Lúcio (2013). The investigation method was the in-depth case study, which sought to understand the dynamics of a phenomenon based on its uniqueness (Yin, 2015), specifically, the influence of hard and soft skills on technological maturity in Industry 4.0 in a foreign multinational.

The results showed that hard skills are mostly related to the technical mastery of information systems (IS), industrial automation, process management and data analysis through business intelligence (BI), big data, statistics, and data mining. Soft skills correlate with each other and make up a dynamic set of behavioral skills, such as assertiveness, autonomy, communication, creativity, empathy, and resilience, among others.

We found that the research unit developed hard and soft skills in the first levels of technological maturity for Industry 4.0, both through the individual efforts of employees and organizational initiatives, like training and development.

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