Collaborative Research: Developing Business Communication Skills in Manufacturing Technician Education

The advanced manufacturing and production fields have growing need for skilled technicians who can communicate effectively in teams. In response to this workforce demand, the project team will develop and test an adaptive virtual reality (VR) platform to help manufacturing technician students learn business communication skills. The platform will deliver interactive case studies that allow students to practice business communication skills needed in a smart factory context. To support integration of these adaptive VR case studies within courses, faculty in advanced manufacturing programs will participate in extensive professional development as they collaboratively develop new VR business communication case studies. In addition, the project will support faculty externships in industry to enhance their knowledge of current trends, skills requirements, new tools, and career opportunities in advanced manufacturing. This knowledge will help them improve their teaching and better serve their students. To strengthen the alignment between coursework and job tasks, the project draws on the long-standing partnership between Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, Purdue University, and industry partners. Recognizing that the incumbent manufacturing workforce is maturing, the project also focuses on fostering and investigating the communication skills that facilitate the transfer of highly specialized technical skills, knowledge, and expertise across the multiple generations in the manufacturing workforce.

The intellectual merit of the project rests on the implementation of a research and development cycle that facilitates the development, testing, investigation, and revision of project activities and deliverables for improvement and goal attainment (e.g., advanced manufacturing technicians who develop the technical knowledge and skills, as well as the soft skills to work efficiently and effectively in modern manufacturing). To answer a priori and emerging questions, the project will conduct a mixed methods study to advance knowledge of the effectiveness of integrating the learning of technical knowledge/skills with soft skills in curricular and educational materials (i.e., case studies within a virtual reality platform). The quantitative and qualitative study will examine the integration of manufacturing and communication job tasks through pre-post outcomes assessments, structured interviews and focus groups, descriptive and trend analyses, analyses of the quality of deliverables and products, and thematic content analyses of information from interviews, focus group discussions, and open-ended survey questions.