The threat of a skills gap has prompted numerous companies to up their investment into skills development.  Whilst many of these efforts have been instigated by tech companies, a recently launched project from industrial giant Siemens shows how diverse efforts are.

The MindSphere Innovation Network (MINe) is a partnership with a number of British universities, including those of Sheffield and Newcastle, each of whom will work closely with the company to ensure that their undergraduate, masters and apprenticeship programs all have access to the latest tools, data and approaches.

As the name of the initiative suggests, the company’s IoT platform MindSphere is central to this offering.  It connects industrial machines together via IoT-based protocols, allowing data from a range of sources to be captured and analyzed simultaneously.

“Collaboration is central to delivering successful, robust and secure industrial IoT projects. Universities can be key partners in this process, often having expertise industry doesn’t such as data science, visualisation and insights into human behaviour including how people engage with technology,” Siemens explain.  “This is why Siemens developed the MindSphere Innovation Network in partnership with several universities two years ago, which in turn has informed the Connected Curriculum we have announced this week. I am now looking forward to working with Sheffield, John Moores, Middlesex and Manchester Metropolitan universities to help explore the full potential of Industrial IoT with our MindSphere platform at the heart of the process.”

The universities believe that the partnership will help them to provide strong, practice-based learning on relevant tools and platforms to students, providing them with the skills needed here and now in the labor market.  As skills development becomes an ever more important for companies, this kind of collaboration with academia is likely to become a more common sight.