Fusion skills for engineers working in Industry 5.0

The introduction of the digital technologies that are heralding the coming of industry 5.0 present unique challenges to engineering education and engineering educators. The knowledge and skills requirements that have been fundamental to engineering education and imparted to engineering graduates across recent generations are likely to be, at best supplemented, at worst usurped by emerging digital skills in application specific data science, machine learning and AI. While some trends are emerging in the nature of these skills what impact they will have and how engineering education will need to react is less clear. In this paper, will we review several conceptualisations of these skills and aim to draw out the important aspects that engineering educators should be considering when designing future looking curricula. One particularly persuasive framing is that of fusion skills. These skills move on from the typically viewpoint of jobs being categorised as either human activities or machine activities and looks towards activities where humans and machine work in concert - as hybrid activities - requiring a fundamentally different skill set. We conclude by describe what an engineering curriculum might look like that integrates and promotes such emerging fusion skills to ensure our graduates are prepared to work in industry 5.0.