Emerging Smart City Job Roles and Skills for Smart Urban Governance

Abstract

More and more smart cities are emerging worldwide aiming to improved urban management and sustainable growth by the use of digital technologies. People comprise a crucial axis in these efforts, and a high-skilled workforce is key in making them a reality. However, the digital transformation of urban places has disrupted the skills that professionals need to possess in order to remain productive and competitive. Skilled workers are lagging behind demand, and therefore addressing the skill shortage of the smart cities’ workforce is vitally important. Our research aimed at identifying emerging smart city job roles and skills and providing a mapping among them to steer the development of contemporary lifelong education programs for smart cities’ workforce. We concluded that three primary new job roles are required for smart city professionals: the smart city planner, the smart city IT manager, and the smart city IT officer. Moreover, we created a framework with 102 skills classified into 4 categories (transversal, generic IT, DevOps, and smart city-related skills) and determined the 42 most important ones for smart cities. Transversal (soft) skills dominated the top 10, while social skills came in first. Finally, three curricula were produced by defining which of these 42 skills are mandatory for each smart city job role. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.