The New-Collar Workforce in Industry 4.0

With the adoption of advanced technologies on the factory floor — many seemingly lifted from the pages of science fiction — blue-collar jobs have become digital, new-collar jobs. The basis of the fabrication process may be the same, but today’s industrial machines now need a more sophisticated operator or service technician who can also interface with robotics, gather data from sensors, revise CAD files, and perform ever changing tasks that have not yet been invented.

Industry 4.0 is not simply a collection of new tools but an integrated system of hardware, software, and data where real-time feedback creates a continuous improvement loop to reduce downtime, improve quality, and communicate throughout the supply train. The modern manufacturing plant is a smart factory, and companies such as GE, Trumpf, and Siemens have already built true Industry 4.0 facilities that utilize multiple digital technologies, in concert, to drive performance.

Skills gap

The talk of the skills gap in manufacturing is based upon data gathered by the U.S. Department of Labor and released in 2012. The data predicted a shortfall of 2 million skilled manufacturing workers by the year 2020². Recent research from the National Association of Manufacturers projects a shortage of about 3 million workers³ by 2025, and 77 percent of their members who responded to a 2018 second-quarter survey on primary business challenges listed “a quality workforce” as their most pressing concern⁴.

Myriad factors have contributed to this manufacturing skills gap, including: factory floor changes in response to the exponential pace of technological innovation, requiring workers to keep pace; an emphasis during the past few decades on four-year degrees; trade schools and community colleges educating fewer manufacturing workers; and parents, students, and high school guidance counselors holding on to faulty perceptions of factory work as the dirty, dangerous work of the past.

Collaborating with robots

A pervasive fear in today’s job market is loss of jobs to automation. Robots are safer, increasingly cost-effective, highly reliable, and, when incorporated with artificial intelligence, they have an almost human-level capability to learn new tasks. That said, at the moment (and in the near future), humans are still needed to design, program, monitor, and, yes, repair robotic tools. A few companies are already placing robots in “cobot” roles, in which the robots operate as collaborators with human worker counterparts. In such capacity, robots perform the mundane, repetitive tasks, freeing humans to perform those that require higher cognitive functioning, such as making informed management decisions.

Additive manufacturing (AM), or 3D printing, holds perhaps the most promise to transform the world’s materials and physical objects. With it comes a new approach to how objects are manufactured, as well as a new design mentality that specifically takes into account the evolving capabilities of AM. Currently, most engineers, operators, and technicians graduated from college or gained certifications before AM was invented.

Compounding the lack of training among engineers and technicians is the fact that companies tend to overestimate ease of use of machines and they give 3D printer responsibility to a usually already overworked IT or engineering department that often does not have time to troubleshoot a brand-new-to-them technology. I’m often asked, “Can you help us find a better 3D printer?” My answer is, “You need help finding an operator with the experience, time, and desire to tinker with your current machine.”