UTIC Inaugural Challenge – AUKUS Workforce Development

The UTIC Challenge has been created to identify innovative solutions to pressing undersea technology challenges through engagement with academia in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia (AUKUS). Through the UTIC Challenge, UTIC hopes to seed academic investment in the most innovative workforce and supply chain development concepts for future undersea technology growth in defense and commercial environments.

Challenge #1: Workforce Development

• The first UTIC Challenge seeks innovative strategies to strengthen the training environment for either current/future technologists who develop critical undersea technology or manufacturing professionals who build and support undersea technologies. For this first challenge, participating academic teams will reference a specific challenge scenario (below) as the basis to prepare and present training and workforce development strategies either for innovative technologists or focused manufacturers involved in solving the identified challenge.

Challenge Reference Scenario (2023-2024)

• AUKUS navies have identified the expansion of their portfolio of cutting edge manned and unmanned undersea vehicles as critical to their defense missions. Therefore, they need to coordinate now with their industry partners to train the technologists and manufacturing experts of tomorrow to develop and deploy the next generation of undersea vehicles that will help them maintain undersea superiority. In addition, there are growing commercial needs for undersea vehicles in areas such as environmental surveillance, oil and gas, and wind energy.

Award Information

• UTIC will award at least one award per challenge category (a training recommendation for experts to develop undersea tech, and a training recommendation for professional that build undersea tech) in the sum of at least $15000 to the winning team per category. This monetary award will be for use as scholarship funding or academic program development at the winning team’s academic institution.

Eligibility Criteria

• Accepted participating teams will be from accredited higher education academic organizations (conferring associate or higher degrees) or upper-level (high school) vocational programs in the AUKUS alliance countries, preferably with workforce development, people development, training, vocational training, etc. areas of focus or centers of excellence. Additional team details:
  • Each participating team member and the team leader must be a citizen (naturally born/naturalized) of one of the AUKUS countries.
  • Each team should include at least one professional and/or tenured professor, lab director, project leader or similar professional educational role in their respective institution. This individual will be identified as the team leader.
  • Each team must also include students actively seeking an associates, undergraduate, advanced or professional/advanced (high school) vocational degree, or be active in a post-degree research efforts at the institution.
  • Each team will have no less than 3 team members and no more than 10. The ideal team size is 5 participants (1 leader, 2 – 4 students).
  • Special Blended Teams Notes:
    • Blended teams from single institutions with campuses in multiple AUKUS countries will be accepted, and are encouraged.
    • Blended teams from multiple, collaborative academic organizations will also be accepted, as long as the organizations reside in one or more of the AUKUS.
      • UTIC request that blended teams be comprised of members of no more than 3 academic organizations.

For more information, visit UTIC.