The transportation digital skills gap refers to the growing disparity between the technological advancements of the highways and transportation industry and the existing skill sets of its workforce.
It is estimated that a shortage of digital skills is costing the UK £63 billion annually.  

New technological advancements are constantly being made in the transportation sector, however the potential of these technologies will be limited if the average transport professional does not know how to use them. 

The purpose of this Policy Briefing is to identify the five key digital skills the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT) believes will be essential to the future of transport, assess the current ability of the sector in each of these skills, and provide recommendations to help close the transportation digital skills gap. 

You can read the full Policy Briefing here.

CIHT Digital Skills Working Group

Omar Ajaz
Holly Clapp
Rebecca Kingston
Kateryna Kryshkevych
Maximilian Li
Nicola Lodge
Jack McInally
Rahul Modhvadia
Rebecca Paramor
Federico Perrotta
Rachel Smith
Mabel Still

Background

This Policy Briefing was developed with a working group made up of CIHT Technical Champions and Emerging Professionals. The group initially met to discuss what they believed to be the five most important digital skills the average transport professional would need to help them utilise both existing and emerging technology in their day-to-day work tasks. 

These five skills were:

• Cyber Security - technology that protects the work you do on electronic devices from unauthorised access.
• Data Handling – collecting, cleaning (fixing or removing incorrect, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, duplicate, or incomplete data), analysing and storing data.  
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) – technology that can perform human-like tasks, such as perception, creativity, logic and reasoning.
• Stakeholder Engagement – communicating with groups of people who have significant influence on a topic and/or will be affected by a decision/proposal using digital solutions (such as social media, design tools, engagement tools etc.).
• Geographic Information System (GIS) – a computer system for capturing, storing, checking and displaying data related to positions on Earth’s surface.

The working group then co-designed a survey targeted at transport professionals, asking respondents to rank their current ability in specific tasks associated with the five skills outlined above. 
This survey received a total of 364 responses from both CIHT Members (87%) and Non-Members (13%).

A summary of the survey results is given in this policy briefing and the full survey results can be seen in the Appendix.

The working group then met for a second time to discuss the results of the survey and to set recommendations to help close the transportation digital skills gap. 

Recommendations

The recommendations from the working group were: 

1. Transport professionals need to be more aware of the consequences of a cyber-attack on the UK’s transport network.
2. Transport professionals should be aware of the data they have access to and know what questions to ask of that data.
3. More collaboration is needed between transport professionals and AI professionals to build effective transport AI tools.
4. Transport professionals should ensure that they do not digitally exclude members of society.
5. Transport professionals should appreciate and cultivate all the relevant skillsets required to use GIS to its full potential.