PROGRAMME 3

DEVELOP AI SKILLS PLAN

The Scottish AI Alliance has been working closely with the core Data Lab team to ensure that opportunities to help businesses adopt AI are maximised. The Alliance will be supporting The Data Lab in the development of their Driving Value from AI MOOC which will be launched in late 2022 and is targeted at business leaders and is a follow on from the successful Driving Value from Data MOOC launched in 2020.  

All of Data Lab’s knowledge and enablement services in the data and AI space will be featured in the Scottish AI Playbook resource.  

The Support Circle have also been working closely with organisations such as DDI and Skills Development Scotland to help promote their resources and initiatives as appropriate with representation on Boards (DDI Skills Advisory Gateway) and also expert groups (SDS’s Digital Economy Skills Action Plan).  

The Alliance continues to work in partnership to explore opportunities to accelerate and scale these resources from The Data Lab and other organisations. 

Although not a Year 1 action, work for actions 2.11 and 2.12 is under way. In order to deliver on an AI Skills Plan, the Scottish AI Alliance team aimed to carry out some groundwork in the space to help identify gaps and potential interventions. 

It was proposed that this groundwork could be expanded to incorporate the wider digital and data skills portfolio and involve the Scottish Tech Ecosystem Review (STER) and Digital Strategy teams in the Scottish Government to avoid potential duplication of work. 

The two proposed projects for this initial groundwork exercise were: 

• education pathway mapping for digital, data and AI across all tiers of education in Scotland 

• upskilling/reskilling opportunities for digital, data and AI across Scotland 

A kick-off meeting with an initial working group took place on 27 October 2021. The meeting involved members of the Scottish AI Alliance Support Circle Team, the STER team, the Scottish Government’s Learning Directorate, Skills Development Scotland, Education Scotland and Colleges Scotland. It became apparent in this meeting that the proposed projects were not what was needed and that current work by some of the organisations present already overlap with the proposed work. There was consensus that a deep dive facilitated workshop was required to fully understand the problem(s) needing to be solved and identifying how the three relevant Scottish Government policies/strategies can contribute and intervene.  
 
The Scottish AI Alliance commissioned a Skills Problem Discovery process from December 2021 to February 2022 involving the Scottish Tech Ecosystem Review and Digital Strategy teams at Scottish Government and 12 other stakeholders from across the educations and skills provision landscape. The process involved interviews with core stakeholders (STER, Education Scotland, Skills Development Scotland, SICSA) and culminated in a problem discovery workshop including STER, Education Scotland, Skills Development Scotland, SICSA, CodeClan, Colleges Scotland, DDI, ScotlandIS, Royal Society of Edinburgh, The Data Lab, Scottish Digital Academy and the Digital Strategy team.  
 
The purpose of the process was to: 

• identify what the current problems/barriers/bottlenecks are in the digital, data and AI skills space 

• what efforts are currently being taken across key organisations such as Skills Development Scotland and Education Scotland are to address these problems/barriers/bottlenecks 

• where can government strategies/initiatives like STER, Digital Strategy and AI Strategy intervene and what can they do to support the expert organisations to solve these problems/overcome these barriers/unblock these bottlenecks? 

The report from the process was delivered at the end of February 2022. The Scottish AI Alliance, STER and Digital Strategy teams are due to meet by the end of March to discuss the next steps.