NIMS has announced a new suite of Smart Standards for various manufacturing job positions and industries. According to the NIMS, these standards serve as a starting point for any employer or educator designing or evaluating training in these disciplines.
Industry 4.0, industrial maintenance technology, dimensional measurements, additive manufacturing, machining, and metal forming are the specific disciplines under which the new standards fall.
Smart Standards are a component of NIMS Smart Training Solutions, a framework for modernizing training to keep up with the rapid pace of emergent technologies and forging strong connections between educators and employers.
NIMS’s Smart Standards provide a starting point for employers and educators creating or assessing manufacturing training.
They are “smart” because while all of the duties that comprise a given role are written, mapped, and agreed upon by industry experts, each employer and educational institution can create their own job roles with any combination of duties, depending on their specific requirements.
Employers can, for instance, choose from a repository based on how the company assigns duties. Standardization occurs at the duty level, not the role level, so regardless of how employers construct job roles, they are standardized.
“That’s the benefit of the Smart Standards framework,” says Montez King, executive director of NIMS. “It is adaptable, modular, and the standards are dynamically updatable as industries evolve. No longer is occupational training dictated by a government official or a limited group of industry professionals who decide what a person must do or know to align with industry standards.
We have standardized the duties themselves so that an employer can establish customized roles and a training program based on the actual workplace activities of the business.”
NIMS is presently providing the Interactive Standards Viewer for free, and there is also a paid version that allows employers and educational institutions to quickly customize roles. According to NIMS, a number of new modules will be released over the next few months.