Skills and expertise required by chemical engineers to adopt new technologies

As technology is changing at a rapid rate and the chemical industry’s uptake of new technology is also picking up pace, we highlight the need to review the Skills and Expertise required by chemical engineers to adopt new technologies. The paper argues that there is increased complexity when using new technology which has an impact on identifying hazards & risks. Increasing complexity needs to be understood by practitioners in order to identify all hazards and risks. Limited research exists regarding the uptake of evolving technology in industry and the effectiveness of current tools being used to identify the associated hazards and risks. [1], [2]. This paper brings to the attention of industry practitioners the difficulties in identifying and understanding hazards and risks associated with new technology where decision-making cannot be seen. We also recognise the role of people in understanding hazards and risks with process designs using new advanced control systems/techniques such as neural networks, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Given that there is some evidence that subject matter experts (SMEs) are currently leaving the chemical industry, we place a spotlight on this issue to recognise its impact on understanding hazards and risks. We provide a demonstration of a chemical engineer's career pipeline, which shows how long it takes to create an SME to fully appreciate the impact of losing critical knowledge and being replaced with lacking skill sets. The research aims to highlight that there can be negative impacts when trying to understand the hazards and risks of processes using advanced control systems with inadequate skills and expertise. We acknowledge that the chemical industry may not realise the extent of the problem of lack of skills, and therefore, it does not know that a step change is required in skills and expertise. Rather than waiting for an incident, we propose that there is a need for industry to acknowledge the pre-requisites in skills and expertise when adopting new advanced control systems/techniques to avoid future major accident hazards.