The Electromechanical Worker
At the AGMA/ABMA annual meeting (held March 15–17 in Napa, CA), gear manufacturers, bearing manufacturers and industry suppliers spent a lot of time talking about one of the key issues affecting all of industry: finding and retaining skilled employees.
I hear about a lot of different approaches people are taking, including cooperations with local educational institutions, such as high schools, community colleges and technical trade schools. I heard the competition for dedicated young employees who are interested in joining a manufacturing team is so fierce that many companies who want to hire simply can’t. Some have even begun creating their own in-house training and education programs at least partially in order to bypass that competition and find and develop the necessary talent.
Almost everyone I talked to said they would hire more people if they could. Even at a time when industry growth has stalled or even ground to a halt, nobody is talking about layoffs, closures or shutdowns. Everybody is hiring, or at least trying to do so.
It’s no surprise, then, that interest in robotics and automation is skyrocketing. By automating processes, you can maintain or increase your levels of productivity without adding labor.
This issue, many of our articles touch on this theme.
For example, the article “Easy Integration” (p. 16) talks about how smart couplings and brakes from Mayr help enhance the safety of cobots and other lightweight robots.
