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The causes have been cited as a mixture of different reasons, including aging populations, the attractiveness of industry to young workers, the impact of COVID, and a post-pandemic surge in job changes.
Unfortunately, as experienced people leave, they are taking their abundance of knowledge with them, and these are proving hard to replace. If this trend continues, it’s likely to lead to a major drop in productivity and output.
Eplan is helping businesses across the UK to close the skills gap, both with an industry-leading electrical engineering software platform that helps work to be completed faster, with less errors and making manual tasks easier, and with free drawing software for students and apprentices to upskill the next generation.
Bridging the Skills Gap – Eplan Education for Apprentices
Coming up with a solution to avert this looming crisis isn’t easy.
However, there are tools available to the industry that could begin to bridge the gap. In the UK, many companies offer apprenticeship schemes to bring new talent into their work places. These apprentices can develop their skills with both classroom and hands-on learning. Eplan Education is a brilliant resource that can help apprentices in both these areas.
With Eplan Education, students can learn how to: generate smart, professional electrical designs & automation plans; produce 3D digital twins simply & quickly, as the foundation for electrical panel production, as well as learning other practical skills to help jumpstart their career.
Companies taking on apprentices can benefit significantly from their apprentices having this knowledge and practicing in a ‘real-world’ software environment. For companies providing training in-house, Eplan Education (a student version of the Eplan software) can be implemented directly into those training centres. Alternatively, companies can form partnerships with local universities and colleges to provide the apprentices with access to the Eplan Education software throughout the duration of their course.
Utilising Eplan Education for apprenticeships is a great way to bring new talent up-to-speed, teaching them using a world-leading tool that is widely used in industry. It’s a comprehensive solution that caters to the needs of both educators and learners, and packages include software licenses, teaching plans, and teaching materials that enable educators to create a stimulating and interactive learning environment.
The Eplan Education software and resources are designed to help companies attract, skill-up, and retain, talented individuals by giving them the opportunity to master a stimulating, engaging, modern-day work tool.
So far, Eplan Education has been rolled out to students and apprentices across 180 countries, educating nearly 90,000 electrical engineering students.
Why Your Workforce Will Benefit from Eplan
Furthermore, as a cutting-edge ECAD solution, Eplan provides a vast improvement on simple CAD-derived schematics for electrical engineering projects.
Digitalisation: If your business activities and workflows are paper-based, or require manual updating, then switching to an online platform like Eplan will provide tools that allow your team to generate smart, professional, electrical designs and automation plans which can be shared in the cloud. They can produce 3D digital twins simply, quickly and accurately as the foundation for panel production, allowing them to enjoy the many productivity and efficiency benefits that ECAD software brings to the workplace.
Utilise unskilled labour: Tasks such as panel wiring or mounting from a schematic alone are skilled jobs. But utilising Eplan’s tools means that unskilled workers (such as apprentices, perhaps) may take on these manual tasks with minimal training.
Eplan’s tools firstly provide easy panel layout fault-checking, automatic data uploads, 360-degree visualisation of projects, direct online access to high-quality, accurate component catalogues, and support easy cross-team collaboration.
All this facilitates better project outcomes and ultimately will help retain staff and increase their productivity, while also saving you money.
For example, Eplan’s Smart Wiring and Smart Mounting software removes any need for schematics, and is so easy and intuitive to use that it is suitable even for apprentices with little or no experience.
Its Smart Wiring app produces detailed and comprehensive wiring information for every panel with simple, step-by-step directions, fully describing each connection. On-screen graphics show which components are being connected, the terminal points, and precise routing for every cable within the panel.
Companies can assign wiring and mounting manual work to their apprentices almost immediately, knowing that the information it provides means that control panels can be wired quickly and easily.
Its 3D digital twin means that apprentices can see where and how each component has to be placed, and used in tandem with the smart wiring app, they can also see where the cabling needs to go.
The benefits Eplan and Eplan Education gives to businesses:
- Eplan Education provides on-boarding training for lecturers/teachers, on-going support and teaching materials.
- Positions your company at the forefront of new software developments.
- Increases your attractiveness as an employer to top talent.
- Onboards apprentices faster.
- Better team engagement - and helps retain staff.
- Higher operational productivity and efficiency (faster project turnaround with fewer errors).
- Helps your team maximise their full potential.
- Improves cross-team communication.
- Preserves knowledge within the business.
- Better client relations and retention.
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