The impact of industry 4.0 and state incentives on firms' skills needs

The advent of Industry 4.0, marking the fourth industrial revolution, has profoundly transformed business operations and em-ployment landscapes over the last ten years. While extensive research has focused on this shift's technological, organisational,and economic implications, recent sociological and educational studies have begun to explore the crucial role of skills in facil-itating the implementation of Industry 4.0, along with the resulting new skill requirements. This paper examines a sample ofItalian manufacturing firms that have adopted Industry 4.0 technologies. We draw on Skill-Biased Technological Change theoryto reflect on the relationship between technological change and the emerging skill needs within the firm. Additionally, we inves-tigate the role of state incentives in guiding technological adoption and the subsequent development of skills. Moving beyond thedichotomous understanding of skills, our qualitative research enables us to propose an analytical framework presenting threemain skills categories and their intersections and integrations, which appear to support I4.0 in our case study firms. Finally,while state incentives promote technological upgrades, adoption, and upskilling, they rarely lead to firms developing entirelynew skill sets