In this talk we discuss work by TechWorks, the trade body for electronic systems engineering in the UK, to create a collaborative, open guide to help electronic systems engineers expand their skillset to AI roles.

TechWorks is not specifically an open source organization. However for a number of years it has taken an open approach to many of its standardization practices. For example all the guides from the IoT Security Foundation (part of TechWorks) are release under a Creative Commons license. We will give a brief overview of this organization at the start of the talk.

TechWorks identified that the shortage of AI engineers would represent a problem for the industry going forward. However this is an industry with many, experienced software and hardware engineers. The need therefore was for material to help those engineers transition to AI.

The result, now 18 months into its development, is an open guide to best practice in AI and Machine Learning for experienced professional engineers (https://technes-uk.github.io/best-practice-guide/). The source is maintained on GitHub and written in Sphinx, using a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://github.com/TechNES-UK/best-practice-guide). This allows easy community contributions using pull-requests.

We'll explore the challenges in developing this guide, and share plans for completing the initial release, and then maintaining it going forward.