How skills development affects manufacturing’s competitive capability

Discusses the link between various forms of shopfloor worker competences and the ability of manufacturing plants to compete on different forms of market attractiveness. Shows how movement along a four‐level model of competence, ranging from operator proficiency to high levels of problem‐solving ability, affects a firm’s ability to support improvements in different dimensions of competitiveness. Enables firms to consider their worker competence strategies in terms of their specific competitiveness rather than in some general form of abstraction.