An important question circling around manufacturing right now is how job shops and other producers will address the skills gap that is expected to hit the industry with a shortage of two million workers in the next ten years. Two proposed answers, not mutually exclusive, are robots and education.
At a recent seminar on robotization in manufacturing, hosted by TechSolve, Suzy Teele, head of marketing and communications at the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute(ARM), said, “We’ve got a real challenge in the United States where young people don’t really consider manufacturing as a viable career at the scale that we need it in order for us to grow the manufacturing sector in the United States.” This problem has led to the mission of ARM, which is to advance the use of robots in the manufacturing industry.