How To Stay Ahead Of The Automation Trend? – An Industry Research

The automation of labour with robots is inevitable. It is speculated that by 2025, the latest industrial automation revolution will result in nearly half of the workforce being replaced by machines and process control. New career path opportunities are emerging to replace the obsolete manual jobs of the past, pushing the education sector to transform in order to remain relevant. 

Industrial automation – THE FUTURE IS NOW!

The field of industrial automation has transformed from an emergent technology to a colossal and lucrative industry, as we see today. Numerous reports have predicted its market size will reach at least $USD 370 billion by 2027; doubling from an already impressive $USD 190 billion in 2017.

The Asia Pacific (APAC) was the market leader in 2020 thanks to its immense scale of the manufacturing sector. Europe and North America held the remaining top spots. In addition, China, Japan, and South Korea, are both the largest producers and consumers of industry technologies.

So, what are the reasons for this significant boom of automation? Researches have pointed out 3 prominent driving forces:

1. The modern industrial revolution – Industry 4.0 (or Internet of Things) transforms the digital supply chain across industries. Furthermore, new Industries 5G wireless technologies speed up our capability of multi-process control which vastly optimize production cost and lead the way for future digital disruptions. Honeywell International, Inc., Tech Mahindra Limited and ABB Ltd are some of the main players who are capitalising on these technologies to expand their global market.

2. The transformation of global manufacturing technology from manual to fully automated.

3. Favourable government policies incentivising digitalization to further diversify emerging markets within the industries of transportation, healthcare, retail.

Automation specialists will lead the future of jobs

While the industrial automation expansion showing no sign of slowing down, one major challenge that hinders its growth is the lack of technical expertise in the field. The demand for experience in automation technologies has skyrocketed during the past decade and is becoming the deciding factor in determining one’s future employment prospects.

We can observe this meteoric rise by looking through the job market data trends from 2012 to future predictions in 2025.

Data in the 2012-2014 period showed that demand for industrial engineers in the USA was a tower above all other engineering disciplines. With nearly 25,000 job posts every month, it doubled the number of job posts for mechanical engineers – the next highest discipline. However, when we look at the actual monthly hires, only 1 out 3 posts managed to find a suitable candidate. This phenomenon signifies the major shortage of relevant automation experience in the labour pool, which was unable to keep up with the employer’s demands. This is typical of new industries; when the technology has innovated beyond the current labour capability.

Automation & PLC training courses are booming

So how can one break into the field of industrial automation? Fortunately for us, the rise in job market demand has translated well into the education sector. What we are witnessing is the start of a surge in automation and robotics training programs in a variety of shapes and forms on an international level.

Online training courses are the quickest to catch onto the trend. A quick search on Udemy will return hundreds of courses on PLC training.

While this is the easiest and cheapest learning option, they provide limited practical and hands-on experience, questionable standardisation or certification, and little to no personal interaction.

Most courses also only focus on the PLC programming languages. Although this is a fundamental skill, learning how to use PLCs requires much more than just knowing how to write the code. Laboratory exercises are an integral part of industrial automation training. However, these online courses are excellent if you need a quick introduction or a short refresher on conceptual knowledge.

On the opposite spectrum, a bachelor or master degree will provide you with a more complete training pathway. In exchange, it is the most time consuming and expensive option both for educators and students.

Due to the massive R&D cost and investment risk, only some global universities & institutes have developed a complete course on industrial automation. Here in Australia, the University of Sydney, University of Western Australia, and Engineering Institute of Technology are amongst the few higher education providers that have successfully introduced full degrees in automation, manufacturing, and robotics in recent years.

For the remaining providers, instead of developing a completely new course on automation, they have opted to introduce one or several units on the topic of PLCs, SCADA, and HMIs, etc.

These units become integrated into the existing engineering degrees (mechanical, electrical) or became electives.

This strategy proves to be more popular since it allows the organization to “test the waters” before committing to a full course; able to capitalize on the trend but at a much lower cost. Prominent names using strategy include the University of South Africa, University of Sussex (UK), Purdue University (USA), RMIT (Australia) and many more.