Ufi Charitable Trust (www.ufi.co.uk), an independent grant-funding body that supports the delivery of adult vocational skills through digital technology, has awarded funding of £125,000 for ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) technology to support workplace training in the manufacturing sector.

Ufi is funding South West Wales college (Coleg Sir Gar), which is developing IoT technology in conjunction with employers, to allow training resources to be shared around production environments with minimal additional infrastructure, resource or cost requirements.

The project will exploit the peer-to-peer networking capability of mobile devices to send educational material to smart display screens around the production environment.

Mobile devices will access online resources via Wi-Fi and display directly to local screens anywhere in the workplace.

Networked learning systems do exist in traditional learning environments, but this project will mean that they can be made mobile and quickly set up wherever they are needed in the work-place.

This investment is part of Ufi’s Manufacturing Skills Fund, which will invest £1 million in projects that use digital technology to improve how vocational learning is delivered in the manufacturing sector.

This sector accounts for 45% of all UK exports and directly employs 2.7 million people, who need regular training to up-skill in light of rapid industry developments. However, providing access to training for this large workforce presents a real challenge.

Coleg Sir Gar’s partnership with Ufi will seek to meet this challenge by developing ad hoc pods that can deliver effective training and support in a range of different work-places.