Taxonomy of skills for CCAM workforce transformation

CCAM (Cooperative, connected and automated mobility) will significantly reduce traditional driving roles while creating new positions in remote operations, fleet orchestration, and customer-facing services.

Developing a CCAM-specific taxonomy of knowledge and skills, will guide reskilling and upskilling strategies. This taxonomy will facilitate the understanding, study and identification of each job family in the application to CCAM in the road domain according to the Society of Automotive Engineers levels (SAE levels) of automation, a classification system for driving automation. This system ranges from no driving automation (SAE level 0) to full automation (SAE level 5).

As we have claimed frequently, ReSKILLING envisions the implementation of a strategic approach that will empower the workforce and businesses of Europe's mobility sector (people and goods), to effectively cope with the anticipated changes resulting from CCAM deployment, while also actively contributing to the advancement and refinement of the sector. To anticipate these changes in the transport and mobility workforce, a list of job profiles impacted by CCAM has been consolidated and grouped in job families for structured analysis, based on shared characteristics such as International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-08) occupational codes and corresponding skill levels.

A matrix-driven taxonomy for the CCAM mapping skills across SAE levels

The CCAM-specific taxonomy provides a hierarchical classification of each job family, designed to facilitate their understanding, study, and identification within the context of CCAM, aligned with the SAE levels of automation in the road domain. The methodology developed constructed a matrix for each job family, incorporating skills based on the ESCO classification and the Drive2theFuture project. For each SAE level, a heat map was generated to indicate the criticality of each skill and/or knowledge, reflecting its relevance according to the degree of CCAM penetration.

From taxonomy to impact: Skills-driven reskilling and upskilling through training

The taxonomy provides an updated scientific reference for identifying the competencies required to address work related to CCAM. It emphasises a people-centered approach by guiding the design of training programs tailored to specific skills and adapted to each phase of implementation or SAE level. Crucially, it enables the determination of which professional profiles will disappear, which will remain, and which will emerge, ensuring that educational needs are met through reskilling and upskilling strategies in the CCAM labor field. As CCAM penetrates successive levels of automation, the integration of new technologies into all processes becomes inevitable, reshaping the workforce landscape.

This transformation implies that certain manual labor skills will gradually disappear, while qualified professions will persist but require continuous upskilling to remain relevant in the medium- and long- term. Non-qualified professions may retain only tasks that cannot be automated, or they will need to adopt new skills through targeted educational programs. According to the taxonomy, training efforts should focus on enabling unskilled professionals to redirect their performance toward CCAM needs through reskilling, while ensuring that skilled professionals receive sufficient training to align their evolving abilities with the demands of each level of automation