By John Challen

As a Lecturer in Transport Engineering and Planning at the University of Salford, not to mention a CIHT Technical Champion, Kateryna Kryshkevych has a lot of experience in the area of digital skills for transport professionals.

She was also part of the CIHT’s Digital Skills Working Group, a 12-strong group comprising Technical Champions and Emerging Professionals within CIHT. In 2024, the group was tasked with creating ‘The Transportation Digital Skills Gap’ policy briefing, to help provide guidance to those people working in the areas of highways and transportation.

The five digital skills that Kryshkevych and her colleagues decided were most important were: cyber security, data handling, AI, stakeholder engagement and Geographic Information System (GIS) technology. Armed with this information, a survey was then designed for transport professionals, asking respondents to rank their ability in specific tasks associated with the five skills; over 350 responses were received. 

Kateryna Kryshkevych, CIHT Technical Champion

Data handling, cyber attacks and AI

“For most people, when you say cyber security, it relates to mandatory training, whether you are working in a small or large organisation,” explains Kryshkevych.

“But it was interesting to see how quite a few people emphasised that it goes beyond that mandatory training and many transport professionals really understand the impact of it on a larger scale, such as what a cyber attack can lead to or the impact that data can have if it’s not shared carefully.”

“Data handling is obviously really crucial in what we do every day,” she adds. “The majority of our group felt confident with the processes involved because we all work with some sort of data. But, nevertheless, we decided it is still a very important aspect, which requires really high technical skills to collect, clean and find the appropriate data that we need to work with. With technology evolving so quickly, it’s important to always know where we can find alternative data sources. That is one skill that is worth developing in the future.”

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the discussion within the group was around AI. “A good point was raised about how, moving forwards, we will be split into AI creators and AI users,” recalls Kryshkevych. “As professionals working in [the] transport industry, are we going to be the people creating all the tools and the modelling software, or are we just going to be the users of these tools? We decided that AI technology has to be one of the key skills, because we do want to be AI creators, not just users.”

Finally, stakeholder engagement and GIS were deemed vital areas that would have increased digital demands on them in the future. “All of us work with the general public and various stakeholder groups such as local authorities and National Highways, for example,” Kryshkevych concludes. “GIS is also a big topic because we all use it at some level to demonstrate study findings, and to plot and map data.”

Read the ‘The Transportation Digital Skills Gap’ policy briefing.

Newsletter image: concept of a cyber attack; credit: Shutterstock.