This article was written by Don Golding, President of Angelus Research.  It appeared in the November/December 1995 issue of TIES magazine.

 Lights Out Factories

Will your students be ready?

The term “Lights Out Factories” is being used to describe fully automated factories.  Human hands never touch the products during the manufacturing process.  Engineers, technicians and programmers are the primary people needed to support these new factories.  Sound futuristic?  Think again.  IBM has a keyboard assembly factory in Texas that is totally lights out.  A few engineers and technicians are on-site to support the machines producing computer keyboards.  People drive trucks up to the factory doors delivering raw materials and picking up finished products.  The factory operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with down time used for scheduled maintenance or repair.

 Students today need to prepare themselves for tomorrow’s employment realities.  Young people who choose not to continue their education by enrolling in college, had in the past the option of finding employment in factories as: production workers, machinists, welders, and painters,etc.  These types of jobs are very hard to find today.  Once parts are designed, CAD systems networked to CNC machines can make parts with a click of the mouse.  The economic expansion that began in 1990 feels more like a recession to most of the non technical workforce.  Companies have continued to downsize, shedding workers by the hundreds if not thousands.  What a contrast to the abundance of work and strong pay scales during the roaring eighties.  Business Week focused on the problem by featuring a front page article about declining wages, recently.

Job creation as a whole has been very poor in the nineties.  Companies have focused on automating both information processing and manufacturing, aggressively.  Automating America’s businesses is preferred to sending jobs to overseas, low wage countries.  Jobs will remain in the United States, albeit they are of a technical nature.  Job creation in automation support areas has been very high.  Engineers, technicians and programmers are in great demand today.  This is not true, however, for low skilled manufacturing jobs.  Good paying assembly jobs are scarce.  High paying skilled jobs of the past such as machinists and welders are becoming increasingly hard to find.  A High School diploma will get young people jobs in retail and fast food restaurants.  Not exactly high paying careers.  If students have technical training by the time they graduated from High School, they will be able to find more rewarding and higher paying jobs.

 Young people must focus on technology based jobs in engineering, marketing or business management.  A strong knowledge and understanding of technology will be critical for engineers, technicians and those in marketing and management as well.  Today’s technology is tomorrow’s obsolescence.  Product cycles are becoming shorter than ever.  Many products are obsolete within twelve months of their initial introduction.

The global access to information promises to create immense competition through the leveling of the business playing field.  Single or small groups of companies can no longer control information, effectively creating monopolies.  The free exchange of information is one of the key beneficiaries of our current technological advances.  Information races across the Internet from Tokyo to Los Angeles and London to Moscow almost instantaneously.  Small companies can compete more effectively with their big brethren, using this instantaneous information and a technically trained workforce.

 As automation becomes less expensive, more competition will result.  Automation costs are dropping almost as fast as the price of personal computers.  Capital spending for computers and automation equipment has been brisk during this economic expansion.  Increased automation is the direction that most businesses are pursuing today.  This requires businesses to hire more technically trained employees, now.

 For the United States to be more competitive in the world economy, we need to develop a highly trained technologically based workforce.  We need to educate students in the technical fields as early in the educational process as possible.  Students need to be exposed to automation, engineering and computer programming today.  This will encourage them to pursue well paying careers through pursuing higher education.  The basics of math, science, and English should be stressed.  Vocational training in High School should stress technical skills and give students a solid foundation in the major technology areas.  This will give our young people opportunities for more rewarding and satisfying lives.