Context and Objectives
Having clean, sustainable, and affordable energy is one of the key challenges of the 21st century. This is characterised by a wide variety of technologies flourishing from new nuclear power (fusion and fission), renewables, hydrogen, and new smart grid architectures.
This diversity of technologies will result in increasingly complex energy infrastructures that will alter the knowledge, understanding, and insights required to provide efficient solutions to meet this complexity.
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics will be the cornerstone skills, reinforced by essential soft skills such as an innovator’s mindset, ability to collaborate, and to be agile and ability to address multi-disciplinary topics.
In response to the climate emergency, all the countries are launching massive investments, rapidly proposing energy mix programmes designed to meet the 2°C target. This will require a large talent pool of traditional engineers to deliver these future projects on time and to budget, creating a need for additional skills such as hyperautomation and artificial intelligence.
Assystem’s responsibility, as a leading engineering company dedicated to the global energy transition, is to rejuvenate the way engineering, project management and digital services will be developed in the future through innovation and knowledge development. This has driven the creation of our programme: “Switch and Act for Knowledge”.
Switch and Act for Knowledge programme
This programme is designed around the following vision: “Think Global Act Local” and considers the specific requirements of Assystem in its different countries of operation (France, the United Kingdom, India, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey).
The objective of the programme is to restore the credentials of engineering by promoting an innovation mindset, the continuous development of knowledge during an employee’s entire professional life, and the ability to collaborate to address difficult challenges. This objective will be met through:
- A new Assystem Institute called “Learn to Switch”, led by technical experts who will create and disseminate content through our Learning Management System platform, the research & design, and innovation projects being proposed to employees to diversify their competences. What’s more, our virtual reality platform will be used to facilitate the capitalisation and dissemination of knowledge.
- The creation of a Knowledge Management System to capitalize on the industrial heritage of the group by aggregating all of the group’s business data and coupling it to artificial intelligence algorithms to make relevant information accessible, interviewing senior and junior experts to generate new knowledge to enrich this database, and setting up a double mentoring program (direct and reverse) to aid knowledge transfer and overcome the generation gap within the group.
- The creation of a Research and Innovation Ecosystem Network comprising Tier1 and Tier2 Universities and research organisations with a twofold mission to cross-fertilise the knowledge between industries and academics, and initiate co-development programmes to turn academic knowledge into industrial innovations.
For Tier 1 partners, a dedicated programme called Academic & Innovation Chair is designed to mobilise the support of Master and PhD programmes around topics that are strategic for the energy transition. It also includes the contribution of our experts for university modules. We also have some support concerning the education accessibility through special grants for inclusion and diversity. Finally, the package includes apprenticeship and internships grants.
For Tier 2 partners our support only includes apprenticeship and internship grants and presentation of the group’s topics of interest to students.
This vision is derived through the different countries in which the group is present, representing the projects, the local policies, and the strategy of the group.