Resilience Stands Out: Saudi Telecom Managers Put Human Skills in Industry 5.0 Frame

A study of Saudi Telecom Company (STC) explores how managers see the connection between those workforce capabilities and the organisation’s preparedness for this next phase of industrial change, within Saudi Arabia’s wider Vision 2030 transformation.

People who can work together, solve unfamiliar problems and stay steady through disruption sit at the heart of Industry 5.0, a vision of technological progress that gives employee well-being, sustainability and resilience a central place. A study of Saudi Telecom Company (STC) explores how managers see the connection between those workforce capabilities and the organisation's preparedness for this next phase of industrial change, within Saudi Arabia's wider Vision 2030 transformation.

Published in Sustainability, the research, "Workforce Competencies and Organizational Readiness for Industry 5.0: A Case Study of Saudi Telecom Company (STC)," found strong confidence in both organisational readiness and workforce skills among 96 participating managers.

The findings offer a snapshot of managerial thinking at a major telecommunications company, with a clear boundary. They describe perceptions gathered through a survey, so they cannot establish employees' actual skill levels or prove that organisational policies produced those skills.

An industry built around people needs more than technology

The researchers used a one-time electronic survey containing 24 statements, divided equally between organisational readiness and workforce competencies. Managers were selected through a nonrandom approach designed to reach people with relevant organisational knowledge, and rated each statement on a five-point agreement scale. Readiness covered human-centred practices, sustainability-oriented strategy and resilience; workforce capabilities covered problem-solving, working with people, technology use and development, and self-management.

The study draws on socio-technical systems theory, which considers how people, technology and organisational arrangements fit together during change. For Industry 5.0, that means examining whether advanced systems operate within workplaces that support human needs, responsible resource use and adaptability. The framework gives researchers a way to examine company preparedness alongside workforce capabilities, recognising that employees need social, analytical and personal skills as well as technical knowledge.

Managers see strength in resilience and collaboration

Overall organisational readiness averaged 4.36 out of five, compared with 4.31 for workforce competency availability, placing both in the researchers' "very high" category. The difference between the overall ratings was small in practical terms. Resilience led the organisational measures at 4.47, followed by human-centred practices at 4.34 and sustainability-oriented strategic readiness at 4.28, producing a broadly positive picture across all three areas.

Managers gave particularly strong ratings to recovery after crises or disruptions, which averaged 4.63, and business continuity planning, at 4.55. Employee involvement in decision-making received a comparatively lower score of 4.16, suggesting an area worth examining more closely despite the favourable overall assessment of human-centred practices. These ratings describe how managers viewed company arrangements, without independently verifying how those arrangements worked in practice.

Working with people ranked highest among workforce capabilities at 4.36, covering collaboration, communication and knowledge sharing. Technology use and development followed at 4.32, with problem-solving and self-management both scoring 4.27. Self-management included adaptability, handling stress and coping with organisational change. Every competency area remained in the very high category, so the lower rankings identify relative opportunities for development rather than demonstrated skills shortages.

Strong connections emerge between strategy and skills

Managers who rated organisational readiness more highly generally gave higher ratings to workforce capabilities, producing a strong correlation of 0.87. A statistical model combining the three readiness measures accounted for 76.8% of the variation in reported workforce competency scores. That figure describes how closely the survey ratings moved together; it does not mean organisational readiness created 76.8% of employees' skills or that the direction of influence has been established.

Sustainability-oriented strategic readiness showed the strongest association with overall workforce ratings after the three readiness areas were considered together, followed by resilience. Human-centred practices did not show a clear independent association with the overall competency score once the other two areas were taken into account. This finding does not make employee well-being or participation unimportant, particularly because the measures shared considerable overlap.

The pattern differed across individual skill areas: resilience had the strongest associations with problem-solving and technology use, and sustainability-oriented strategy had the strongest associations with working with people and self-management. Human-centred practices showed an association with working with people in the separate analysis of that domain. These findings support examining preparedness and skills together, with caution about treating each organisational priority as a separate influence.

Confidence needs checking against everyday experience

The questionnaire produced internally consistent answers, with reliability scores above 0.92 for both overall measures. A deeper examination supported five underlying factors rather than the seven categories proposed in the framework, and those factors did not match the intended categories cleanly. The seven areas remain useful descriptive groupings, but this study did not establish them as seven clearly distinct dimensions.

The same managers assessed both company readiness and workforce skills, creating a risk that general confidence in STC inflated the relationship between them. Fifteen respondents gave identical ratings to all 24 statements, including 11 who selected "strongly agree" throughout. Removing those 15 responses left a strong correlation of 0.83 among the remaining 81 managers, and the combined readiness model still accounted for 71% of variation in workforce ratings. The main pattern survived this check, and shared survey bias remained possible.

A single company and a purposively selected managerial sample cannot represent the Saudi telecommunications sector or the national workforce. The researchers could not calculate a response rate because the number receiving the survey link was unknown, and they collected no demographic or departmental information for comparing groups. Employees' own experiences of training, working conditions, equity and well-being were not directly captured. Sustainability ratings concerned perceived practices and strategy, without measuring energy efficiency, carbon emissions, resource consumption or circular-economy outcomes.

The authors recommend periodic assessments involving several workforce groups, continued development of problem-solving and self-management, and environmental performance indicators alongside perception surveys. Maintaining interpersonal and technological strengths, employee-centred practices and business continuity arrangements also deserve attention.

Research across more organisations, using independent assessments and repeated measurements over time, could show whether readiness and skills develop together. AI governance, ethical oversight and human–AI collaboration remain additional questions for future study, beyond what this survey measured.