10 January 2022
There’s a huge digital engineering skills shortfall and employment gap in the UK’s engineering workforce. To help address the shortfall, UWE Bristol launched a new Big Data course in November 2021.
UWE Bristol runs the Digital Engineering Technology & Innovation (DETI) Skills Innovate programme in the West of England – identifying what skills need boosting and then designing appropriate training courses – all to enable the digital transition of local industry supported by DETI’s main programme.
Big Data
With the high adoption rate of sensors and connected devices in manufacturing industries, there has been a huge increase in data points available. If analysed, this Big Data has potential to reveal new information and patterns that can enable the improvement of process efficiency.
Technicians identified Big data analysis as a core emerging area they lacked knowledge and analytic skills in, so UWE Bristol designed a course to upskill DETI partners employees.
Upskilling
The Big Data CPD course covered the fundamentals of Big Data concepts and the key tools and systems for practically applying the analytics. Topics covered included:
- Introduction to Big Data
- SQL vs NoSQL databases
- Data Quality
- Knowledge Retrieval
On 24th November 2021, Professor Kamran Munir & Dr Ahsan Ikram from UWE Bristol’s Department of Computer Science, delivered the course online to 15 participants from UWE, the University of Bath, the National Composites Centre (NCC) and other local industries.
Growing the CPD offer
DETI Skills Innovate recognises the need for continuing to offer this course to reach more of the Engineering workforce, therefore UWE Bristol are working to develop the content into a virtual pre-recorded offering. This will enable flexible self-study and the opportunity to revisit material. We’ll keep our readers informed of when this becomes available.
In addition to Big Data upskilling, UWE Bristol is assisting the NCC to deliver another DETI Skills Innovate course on 5G-Encode (AI and VR) – expected to be delivered in February 2022.
If you have any questions about the Big Data or 5G-Encode courses, DETI Skills Innovate colleague Dr. Halimah Abdullahi can be contacted on [email protected].
