Digital transformation (DT) efforts allow technical improvements that introduce new capabilities into the work or battlespace. These capabilities, in turn, afford organizations the opportunity to create new processes to increase automation and efficiency. However, how will organizations ensure their workforce has the skills necessary to implement processes that have not been invented yet? Forward-leaning organizations respond by stating their intent to upskill their workforce. This buzzword/catch-all term describes actions associated with developing new abilities within an existing workforce to minimize skill gaps across an agency. Unfortunately, many approaches to upskilling rely on industrial-age models of education and training; which do not match learner needs.
Consider the introduction of model development tools into the engineering discipline. The ability to digitally visualize and model change within and across systems has created a need for a new workforce- specifically model based systems engineers (MBSEs) who can work with new tools and can incorporate a new type of thinking into their practice. This suggests the current engineering workforce must face a paradigm shift in their thinking as they develop mastery with a new toolset.
One upskilling approach is to expand the skillsets of experienced and competent systems engineers; thereby “creating” MBSEs from an existing workforce. In the authors' organization, experts had begun to develop training using this approach. Their training products were technically accurate, but did not follow educational best practices such as reducing cognitive load. In addition, time experts spent developing training products was time away from performing MBSE work – magnifying the problem of the MBSE shortage. The authors conducted a qualitative case study from the lens of heutagogy theory, which focuses on student-centered instructional practices designed to develop learner autonomy in tandem with capability. They provide findings related to the effect on the workforce members' skillsets, and suggest strategies for applying heutagogy to workforce upskilling efforts.