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5 Manufacturing roles that will soon look very different. The factory of the future will demand a whole new combination of skills.

Article by Stephen Laaper and Asi Klein

AUG 25, 2021

This article appeared in Industry Week magazine and is available to read in full – here

The fact that digital transformation and Industry 4.0 are changing manufacturing operations is no secret, nor is the fact that skilled manufacturing talent is increasingly harder to come by. With Deloitte research projecting that 2.4 million manufacturing jobs will be unfilled by 2028, the question becomes: What talent and skills do manufacturers need in order to succeed in the factory of the future?

Here we look at five manufacturing jobs and how they are expected to evolve. We highlight the critical new skills needed for these jobs that manufacturers will need to cultivate in order to better recruit, train and upskill workers.

A common thread across all of the jobs below is a trend in “human capabilities”—or soft skills—becoming just as important as technical and manufacturing skills. For example, as artificial intelligence (AI) reduces the need for humans to be involved in lower-value, manual work, workers increasingly need to be able to take on new responsibilities in areas such as problem-solving, communication, interpretation, design thinking and customer engagement.

Five Roles that are Getting Smarter

Several manufacturing roles are changing due to technology innovation. We chose the five roles below to highlight as these roles are experiencing a particularly high level of evolution in the smart factory era and are representative of how manufacturing jobs will continue to evolve.

The Production Planner

The Industrial Engineer

The Operator

The Line Leader

The Quality Engineer

Read about each one in turn in the original article – here