To provide future trends and workforce skills impact analysis: how new advances in technology will affect the National Oceanography Centre’s (NOC), National Marine Facilities' (NMF) workforce capability to 2035.
The NOC is one of the world’s top oceanographic institutions. They identified that the maritime industry and oceanographic research was commencing a period of significant change brought about by the adoption and use of new technology.
The NOC commissioned SeaBot Maritime to forecast future trends and assess their impact on the workforce skills of their National Marine Facilities Workforce, mapping skills migration to 2035.
The work identified the impact of marine autonomous systems across marine operational areas, and set out the knowledge and enabling actions that would succession plan the skills needed to improve delivery of existing NMF's services, and develop new future projects. Outputs were refined into a roadmap of skills development and training recommendations to 2035.
National Oceanography Centre's NMF Lead said:
“Through their expertise and practical knowledge of the sector, of technology impact, innovation and workforce skills transformation; SeaBot Maritime were able to provide us with valuable guidance on where our short, medium and long term skills gaps would emerge. They provided the guidance we needed to support facilities and training development investment decisions."
In 2021, the National Oceanography Centre recognised that they faced a significant period of change, driven by technological development, technology adoption and environmental regulation. They sought robust, evidenced guidance regarding the skills that a future maritime industry scientific workforce would need; to pull through this change and underpin future operational capability.
The NOC commissioned SeaBot Maritime to forecast future trends and assess their impact on the workforce skills of their National Marine Facilities Workforce, mapping skills migration to 2035.
The SeaBot Maritime team’s research into past technology adoption revealed that whilst a number of recent technology enhancements had been successfully adopted across the industry, their failures across industry were regularly traced back to a root cause of operator error – either for lack of knowledge of how the system worked or lack of training in it’s use.
The team assessed technological impact across Deck Operations; Vessel Engineering; Scientific Systems Management and Scientific Systems Operations.
Investigations revealed that the most significant advancements expected within the next 10-15 years will be in artificial intelligence, leading to increasing use of autonomous systems. These will be implemented across the range of equipment operated by the NOC, which will fundamentally change the way that their workforce will interact with their equipment systems.
As with the advances in AI, considerable advances in communications systems are forecast which will enable personnel to work in a remote onshore operating centre environment, rather than from vessels. This change will require a fundamental evaluation of current operating methodologies to allow operations to continue safely and efficiently whilst being conducted from a remote location.
As a result of with these technological advancements and the shift into a remote operation centre environment, soft skills will become even more important. The cooperation needed between project teams will increase as all elements of offshore operations become interlinked.
About the National Oceanography Centre
Providing the UK’s National Capability, the NOC undertake world leading research in large scale oceanography and ocean measurement technology innovation; working with government and business to turn great science and technology into advice and applications.
The National Oceanography Centre (NOC) is an independent self-governing organisation funded by UK Research and Innovation to work on National Capability programmes. The NOC manages the National Marine Equipment Pool, including Europe’s largest fleet of autonomous and robotic vehicles, and two state of the art research ships, RRS Discovery and RRS James Cook.